Symbolic of the place and people too,

White Cotton Night-Cap Country, the suggestion of Browning's title Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is due. To her the poem is dedicated.

Browning's interest in those who were rendered homeless and destitute in France during the Prussian invasion was shown in a practical way in the spring of 1871. He had for long been averse to the publication of his poems in magazines and reviews. In 1864 he had gratified his American admirers by allowing Gold Hair and Prospice to appear in the Atlantic Monthly previous to their inclusion in Dramatis Persona. A fine sonnet written in 1870, suggested by the tower erected at Clandeboye by Lord Dufferin in memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of Gifford, had been inserted in some undistributed copies of a pamphlet, "Helen's Tower," privately printed twenty years previously; the sonnet was published at the close of 1883 in the Pall Mall Gazette, but was not given a place by Browning in the collected editions of his Poetical Works. In general he felt that the miscellaneous contents of a magazine, surrounding a poem, formed hardly an appropriate setting for such verse as his. In February 1871, however, he offered to his friend and, publisher Mr Smith the ballad of Herve Riel for use in the Cornhill Magazine of March, venturing for once, as he says, to puff his wares and call the verses good. His purpose was to send something to the distressed people of Paris, and one hundred guineas, the sum liberally fixed by Mr Smith as the price of the poem, were duly forwarded—the gift of the English poet and his Breton hero. The facts of the story had been forgotten and were denied at St Malo; the reports of the French Admiralty were examined and indicated the substantial accuracy of the poem. On one point Browning erred; it was not a day's holiday to be spent with his wife "la Belle Aurore" which the Breton sailor petitioned for as the reward of his service, but a "conge absolu," the holiday of a life-time. In acknowledging his error to Dr Furnivall, and adding an explanation of its cause, he dismissed the subject with the word, "Truth above all things; so treat the matter as you please."[107]

For the purposes of holiday-making the resources of the northern French coast, with which Browning's ballad of the Croisickese pilot is associated, were, says Mrs Orr, becoming exhausted. Yet some rest and refreshment after the heavy tax upon his strength made by a London season with its various claims were essential to his well-being. His passion for music would not permit him during his residence in town to be absent from a single important concert; the extraordinary range of his acquaintance with the works of great and even of obscure composers was attested by Halle. In his sonnet of 1884, inscribed in the Album to Mr Arthur Chappell, The Founder of the Feast, a poem not included in any edition of his works, he recalls these evenings of delight:

Sense has received the utmost Nature grants, My cup was filled with rapture to the brim, When, night by night—ah, memory, how it haunts!— Music was poured by perfect ministrants, By Halle, Schumann, Piatti, Joachim.

Long since in Florence he had become acquainted with Miss Egerton-Smith, who loved music like himself, and was now often his companion at public performances in London. She was wealthy, and with too little confidence in her power to win the regard of others, she lived apart from the great world. In 1872 Browning lost the warm-hearted and faithful friend who had given him such prompt, womanly help in his worst days of grief—Miss Blagden. Her place in his memory remained her own. Miss Egerton-Smith might seem to others wanting in strength of feeling and cordiality of manner. Browning knew the sensitiveness of her nature, which responded to the touch of affection, and he could not fail to discover her true self, veiled though it was by a superficial reserve. And as he knew her, so he wrote of her in the opening of his La Saisiaz:

You supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world: May be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled. But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand —Maybe throb of heart, beneath which,—quickening farther than it knew,— Treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue. Disembosomed, re-embosomed,—must one memory suffice, Prove I knew an Alpine rose which all beside named Edelweiss?

Miss Egerton-Smith was the companion and house-mate of Browning and his sister in their various summer wanderings from 1874 to 1877. In the first of these years the three friends occupied a house facing the sea at the village of Mers near Treport. Browning at this time was much absorbed by his Aristophanes' Apology. "Here," writes Mrs Orr, "with uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set off on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind, which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall." The following summers were spent at Villers in Normandy (1875), at the Isle of Arran (1876), and in the upland country of the Saleve, near Geneva. During the visit to the Saleve district, where Browning and his sister with Miss Egerton-Smith occupied a chalet named La Saisiaz, he was, Mrs Orr tells us, "unusually depressed and unusually disposed to regard the absence from home as a banishment." Yet the place seemed lovely to him in its solitude and its beauty; the prospect of Geneva, with lake and plain extended below, varying in appearance with the shifting of clouds, was repose to his sense of sight. He bathed twice each day in the mountain stream—"a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees." He read and rested; and wrote but little or not at all. Suddenly the repose of La Saisiaz was broken up; the mood of languorous pleasure and drowsy discontent was at an end. While preparing to join her friend on a long-intended mountain climb Miss Egerton-Smith, with no forewarning, died. The shock was for a time overwhelming. When Browning returned to London the poem La Saisiaz, the record of his inquisition into the mystery of death, of his inward debate concerning a future life, was written. It was the effort of resilience in his spirit in opposition to that stroke which deprived him of the friend who was so near and dear.

The grouping of the works produced by Browning from the date of the publication of The Ring and the Book (1868) to the publication of La Saisias (1878), which is founded upon the occasions that suggested them, has only an external and historical interest. The studies in the Greek drama and the creations to which these gave rise extend at intervals over the whole decade. Balaustion's Adventure was published in 1871, Aristophanes' Apology in 1875, the translation of The Agamemnon of AEschylus in 1877. Two of the volumes of this period, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871) and Fifine at the Fair (1872) are casuistical monologues, and these, it will be observed, lie side by side in the chronological order. The first of the pair is concerned with public and political life, with the conduct and character of a man engaged in the affairs of state; the second, with a domestic question, the casuistry of wedded fidelity and infidelity, from which the scope of the poem extends itself to a wider survey of human existence and its meanings.[108] Two of the volumes are narrative poems, each tending to a tragic crisis; Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873) is a story entangled with questions relating to religion; The Inn Album (1875) is a tragedy of the passion of love. The volume of 1876, Pacchiarotto with other Poems, is the miscellaneous gathering of lyrical and narrative pieces which had come into being during a period of many years. Finally in La Saisiaz Browning, writing in his own person, records the experience of his spirit in confronting the problem of death. But it was part of his creed that the gladness of life may take hands with its grief, that the poet who would live mightily must live joyously; and in the volume which contained his poem of strenuous and virile sorrow he did not refrain from including a second piece, The two Poets of Croisic, which has in it much matter of honest mirth, and closes with the declaration that the test of greatness in an artist lies in his power of converting his more than common sufferings into a more than common joy.

Balaustion's Adventure, dedicated to the Countess Cowper by whom the transcript from Euripides was suggested, or, as Browning will have it, prescribed, proved, as the dedication declares, "the most delightful of May-month amusements" in the spring of 1871. It was the happiest of thoughts to give the version of Euripides' play that setting which has for its source a passage at the close of Plutarch's life of Nicias. The favours bestowed by the Syracusans upon Athenian slaves and fugitives who could delight them by reciting or singing the verses of Euripides is not to be marvelled at, says Plutarch, "weying a reporte made of a ship of the city of Caunus, that on a time being chased thether by pyrates, thinking to save themselves within their portes, could not at the first be received, but had repulse: howbeit being demaunded whether they could sing any of Euripides songes, and aunswering that they could, were straight suffered to enter, and come in."[109] From this root blossomed Browning's romance of the Rhodian girl, who saves her country folk and wins a lover and a husband by her delight in the poetry of one who was more highly honoured abroad than in his own Athens. Perhaps Browning felt that an ardent girl would be the best interpreter of the womanly heroism and the pathos of "that strangest, saddest, sweetest song," of Euripides. Of all its author's dramas the Alkestis is the most appropriate to the occasion, for it is the poem of a great deliverance from death, and here in effect it delivers from death, or worse, the fugitives from the pirate-bark, "at destruction's very edge," who are the suppliants to Syracuse. In accepting the task imposed upon him Browning must have felt that no other play of Euripides could so entirely have borne out the justice of the characterisation of the poet by Mrs Browning in the lines which he prefixed to Balaustions Adventure:

Our Euripides the human, With his droppings of warm tears.

"If the Alkestis is not the masterpiece of the genius of Euripides," wrote Paul de Saint-Victor, "it is perhaps the masterpiece of his heart."[110]

Balaustion herself, not a rose of "the Rosy Isle" but its wild-pomegranate-flower, since amid the verdure of the tree "you shall find food, drink, odour all at once," is Hellenic in her bright and swift intelligence, her enthusiasm for all noble things of the mind, the grace of every movement of her spirit, her culture and her beauty. The atmosphere of the poem, which encircles the translation, is singularly luminous and animating; the narrative of the adventure is rapid yet always lucid; the verse leaps buoyantly like a wave of the sea. Balaustion tells her tale to the four Greek girls, her companions, amid the free things of nature, the overhanging grape vines, the rippling stream,

Outsmoothing galingale and watermint, Its mat-floor,

and in presence of the little temple Baccheion, with its sanctities of religion and of art. By a happy and original device the transcript of the Alkestis is much more than a translation; it is a translation rendered into dramatic action—for we see and hear the performers and they are no longer masked—and this is accompanied with a commentary or an interpretation. Never was a more graceful apology for the function of the critic put forward than that of Balaustion:

'Tis the poet speaks: But if I, too, should try and speak at times, Leading your love to where my love, perchance, Climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew— Why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake!

Browning has not often played the part of a critic, and the interpretation of a poet's work by a poet has the double value of throwing light upon the mind of the original writer and the mind of his commentator.

The life of mortals and the life of the immortal gods are brought into a beautiful relation throughout the play. It is pre-eminently human in its grief and in its joy; yet at every point the divine care, the divine help surrounds and supports the children of earth, with their transitory tears and smiles. Apollo has been a herdsman in the service of Admetos; Herakles, most human of demigods, is the king's friend and guest. The interest of the play for Browning lay especially in three things—the pure self-sacrifice of the heroine, devotion embodied in one supreme deed; and no one can heighten the effect with which Euripides has rendered this; secondly, the joyous, beneficent strength of Herakles, and this Browning has felt in a peculiar degree, and by his commentary has placed it in higher relief; and thirdly, the purification and elevation through suffering of the character of Admetos; here it would be rash to assert that Browning has not divined the intention of Euripides, but certainly he has added something of his own. It has been maintained that Browning's interpretation of the spiritual significance of the drama is a beautiful perversion of the purpose of the Greek poet; that Admetos needs no purification; that in accepting his wife's offer to be his substitute in dying, the king was no craven but a king who recognised duty to the state as his highest duty. The general feeling of readers of the play does not fall in with this ingenious plea. Browning, as appears from his imagined recast of the theme, which follows the transcript, had considered and rejected it. If Admetos is to be in some degree justified, it can only be by bearing in mind that the fact by which he shall himself escape from death is of Apollo's institution, and that obedience to the purpose of Apollo rendered self-preservation a kind of virtue. But Admetos makes no such defence of his action when replying to the reproaches of his father, and he anticipates that the verdict of the world will be against him. Browning undoubtedly presses the case against Admetos far more strongly than does Euripides, who seems to hold that a man weak in one respect, weak when brought to face the test of death, may yet be strong in the heroic mastery of grief which is imposed upon him by the duties of hospitality. Readers of the Winter's Tale have sometimes wondered whether there could be much rapture of joy in the heart of the silent Hermione when she received back her unworthy husband. If Admetos remained at the close of the play what he is understood by Browning to have been at its opening, reunion with a self-lover so base could hardly have flushed with gladness the spirit of Alkestis just escaped from the shades.[111] But Alkestis, who had proved her own loyalty by deeds, values deeds more than words. When dying she had put her love into an act, and had refrained from mere words of wifely tenderness; death put an end to her services to her husband; she felt towards him as any wife, if Browning's earlier poem be true, may feel to any husband; but still she could render a service to her children, and she exacts from Admetos the promise that he will never place a stepmother over them. His allegiance to this vow is an act, and it shall be for Alkestis the test of his entire loyalty. And the good Herakles, who enjoys a glorious jest amazingly, and who by that jest can benevolently retort upon Admetos for his concealment of Alkestis' death—for now the position is reversed and the king shall receive her living, and yet believe her dead—Herakles contrives to put Admetos to that precise test which is alone sufficient to assure Alkestis of his fidelity. Words are words; but here is a deed, and Admetos not only adheres to his pledge, but demonstrates to her that for him to violate it is impossible. She may well accept him as at length proved to be her very own.

Browning, who delights to show how good is brought out of evil, or what appears such to mortal eyes, is not content with this. He must trace the whole process of the purification of the soul of Admetos, by sorrow and its cruel yet beneficent reality, and in his commentary he emphasises each point of development in that process. When his wife lies at the point of death the sorrow of Admetos is not insincere, but there was a childishness in it, for he would not confront the fact that the event was of his own election. Presently she has departed, and he begins to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehearsed in fancy and endured in fact. In greeting Herakles he rises to a manlier strain, puts tears away, and accepts the realities of life and death; he will not add ill to ill, as the sentimentalist does, but will be just to the rights of earth that remain; he catches some genuine strength from the magnanimous presence of the hero-god. He renders duty to the dead; is quieted; and enters more and more into the sternness of his solitary wayfaring. In dealing with the ignoble wrangle with old Pheres the critic is hard set; but Balaustion, speaking as interpreter for Browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the firmer foothold which he had attained. Perhaps it would have been wiser to admit that Euripides has marred his own work by this grim tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth. But it is true that one who has much to give, like Alkestis, gives freely; and one who has little to give, like Pheres, clutches that little desperately and is starved not only in possessions but in soul. For Browning the significance of the scene lies in the idea, which if not just is ingenious, that the encounter with Pheres has an educational value for Admetos; he detests his father because he sees in him an image of his own egoism, and thus he learns more profoundly to hate his baser self. When the body of Alkestis has been borne away and the king re-enters his desolate halls the full truth breaks in upon him; nothing can be as it has been before—"He stared at the impossible mad life"; he has learnt that life, which yet shall be rightly lived, is a harder thing than death:

He was beginning to be like his wife.

And those around him felt that having descended in grief so far to the truth of things, he could not but return to the light an altered and a better man. Instructed so deeply in the realities of sorrow, Admetos is at last made worthy to receive the blessed realities of joy with the words,

When I betray her, though she is no more, May I die.

The regeneration of Admetos is accomplished. How much in all this exposition is derived from the play, how much is added to it, may be left for the consideration of the reader who will compare the original with the transcript.

If the character of Admetos is somewhat lowered by Browning beneath the conception of the Greek dramatist, to allow room for its subsequent elevation, the conception of Herakles is certainly heightened. We shall not say that Balaustion is the speaker and that Herakles is somewhat of a woman's hero. Browning himself fully enters into Balaustion's enthusiasm. And the presence of the strong, joyous helper of men is in truth an inspiring one. The great voice that goes before him is itself a Sursum corda!—a challenge and a summons to whatever manliness is in us. And the best of it is that sauntering the pavement or crossing the ferry we may happen to encounter this face of Herakles:

Out of this face emerge banners and horses—O superb! I see what is coming; I see the high pioneer-caps—I see the slaves of runners clearing the way, I hear victorious drums.

This face is a life-boat.

For Walt Whitman too had seen Brother Jonathan Herakles, and indeed the face of the strong and tender wound-dresser was itself as the face of a calmer Herakles to many about to die. The speeches of the demigod in Browning's transcript require an abundant commentary, but it is the commentary of an irrepressible joy, an outbreak of enthusiasm which will not be controlled. The glorious Gargantuan creature, in the best sense Rabelaisian, is uplifted by Browning into a very saint of joyous effort; no pallid ascetic, indeed, beating his breast with the stone, but a Christian saint of Luther's school, while at the same time a somewhat over-boisterous benevolent Paynim giant:

Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world! I think this is the authentic sign and sea! Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind, And recommence at sorrow.

Something of the Herakles ideal appears again and again in other poems of Browning. His Breton sailor, Herve Riel, has more than a touch of the Heraclean frankness of gaiety in arduous effort. His Ivan Ivanovitch wields the axe and abolishes a life with the Heraclean joy in righteousness. And in the last of Browning's poems, not without a pathetically over-boisterous effort and strain, there is the suggestion of an ideal conception of himself as a Herakles-Browning; the old man tries at least to send his great voice before him.

The new Admetos, new Alkestis, imagined by Balaustion at the close of the poem, are wedded lovers who, like the married in Pompilia's dream of heaven, "know themselves into one." For them the severance of death has become an impossible thing; and therefore no place is left for Herakles in this treatment of the story. It expresses Browning's highest conception of the union of soul with soul:

Therewith her whole soul entered into his, He looked the look back, and Alkestis died—

died only to be rejected by Hades, as still living, and with a more potent life, in her husband's heart and will. Yet the mortal cloud is round these mortals still; they cannot see things as the gods see. And, for all their hopes and endeavours, the earth which they would renew and make as heaven, remains the old incredulous, unconverted earth,—"Such is the envy Gods still bear mankind." And in such an earth, if not for them, assuredly for others, Herakles may find great deeds to do.

Balaustion has the unique distinction of being heroine throughout two of Browning's poems; and of both we may say that the genius of Euripides is the hero. Aristophanes' Apology is written from first to last with unflagging energy; the translation of the "Herakles" which it includes is a masculine and masterly effort to transport the whole sense and spirit of the original into English verse, and the rendering of the choral passages into lyric form gives it an advantage over the transcript of the "Alkestis." Perhaps not a little of the self-defence of Aristophanes and his statement of the case against Euripides could have been put as well or better in a critical essay in prose; but the method of Browning enables him to mingle, in a dramatic fashion, truth with sophistry, and to make both serve his purpose of presenting not only the case but the character of the great Greek maker of comedy. Balaustion is no longer the ardent girl of the days of her first adventure; she is a wife, with the dignity, the authority of womanhood and wifehood; she has known the life of Athens with its evil and its good; she has been the favoured friend of Euripides; she is capable of confronting his powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true light of intellect and genius even though it shines through earth-born vapours and amid base surroundings.

Athens, "the life and light of the whole world," has sunk under the power of Sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for Balaustion and her Euthukles. The bark that bears them is bounding Rhodesward, and the verse has in it the leap and race of the prow. Balaustion, stricken at heart, yet feels that this tragedy of Athens brings the tragic katharsis; the justice of the gods is visible in it; and above man's wickedness and folly she reaches to "yon blue liberality of heaven." It seems as if the spirit which might have saved Athens is that of the loins girt and the lamp lit which was embodied in the strenuous devotion of Euripides to the highest things; and the spirit which has brought Athens to its ruin is that expressed with a splendid power through the work of Aristophanes. But Aristophanes shall plead for himself and leave nothing unsaid that can serve to vindicate him as a poet and even as a moralist Thus only can truth in the end stand clear, assured of its supremacy over falsehood and over half-truth.

Nothing that Browning has written is more vividly imagined than the encounter of Balaustion with Aristophanes and his crew of revellers on the night when the tidings of the death of Euripides reached Athens; it rouses and controls the feelings with the tumult of life and the sanctity of death, while also imposing itself on the eye as a brilliant and a solemn picture. The revellers scatter before the presence of Balaustion, and she and the great traducer of Euripides stand face to face. Nowhere else has Browning presented this conception of the man of vast disorderly genius, who sees and approves the better way and splendidly follows the worse:

Such domineering deity Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.

It is as if male force, with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life behind it, were met and held in check by the finer feminine force resting for its support upon the divine laws. But in truth Aristophanes is half on the side of Balaustion and of Euripides; he must, indeed, make his stand; he is not one to falter or quail; and yet when the sudden cloud falls upon his face he knows that it is his part to make the worse appear the better cause, knowing this all the more because the justice of Balaustion's regard perceives and recognises his higher self. Suddenly the Tuphon, "madding the brine with wrath or monstrous sport," is transformed into something like what the child saw once from the Rhodian sea-coast (the old romantic poet in Browning is here young once more):

All at once, large-looming from his wave, Out leaned, chin hand-propped, pensive on the ledge, A sea-worn face, sad as mortality, Divine with yearning after fellowship. He rose but breast-high. So much god she saw; So much she sees now, and does reverence.

But in a moment the sea-god is again the sea-monster, with "tail-splash, frisk of fin"; the majestic Aristophanes relapses into the most wonderful of mockers.

No passage in the poem is quite so impressive as this through its strangeness in beauty. But the entry of Sophocles—"an old pale-swathed majesty,"—at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is another of those passages to find which in situ is a sufficient reward for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose:

Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward: mutely passed 'Twixt rows as mute.

The critical study of comedy, its origin, its development, its function, its decline, is written with admirable vigour, but the case of Aristophanes can be read elsewhere. It is interesting, however, to note the argument in support of the thesis that comedy points really to ideals of humanity which are beyond human attainment; that its mockery of man's infirmities implies a conception of our nature which in truth is extra-human; while tragedy on the contrary accepts man as he is, in his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and its terror out of these. It is Aristophanes who thus vindicates Euripides before the revellers who have assembled in his own honour, and they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony. But he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of Sophocles looked for a moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success his depth of failure. For him, in this testing-time of life, art has been the means of probation; he has squandered the gifts bestowed upon him, which should have been concentrated in the special task to which he was summoned. He should have known—he did in fact know—that the art which "makes grave" is higher than that which "makes grin"; his own peculiar duty was to advance his art one step beyond his predecessors; to create a drama which should bring into harmony the virtue of tragedy and the virtue of comedy; to discover the poetry which

Makes wise, not grave,—and glad, Not grinning: whereby laughter joins with tears.

Instead of making this advance he had retrograded; and it remained for a poet of a far-off future in the far-off Kassiterides—the Tin Isle which has Stratford at its heart—to accomplish the task on which Aristophanes would not adventure. One way a brilliant success was certain for Aristophanes; the other and better way failure was possible; and he declined to make the venture of faith. It is with this sense of self-condemnation upon him that he essays his own defence, and it is against this sense of self-condemnation more than against the genius and the methods of Euripides that he struggles. When towards the close of the poem he takes in hand the psalterion, and chants in splendid strains the story of Thamuris, who aspired and failed, as he himself will never do, the reader is almost won over to his side. Browning, who felt the heights and depths of the lyric genius of Aristophanes, would seem to have resolved that in this song of "Thamuris marching," moving in ecstasy amid the glories of an autumn morning, he would dramatically justify his conception of the poet; and never in his youth did Browning sing with a finer rapture of spirit. But reading what follows, the record of the subjugation of Athens, when the Athenian people accept the ruin of their defences as if it were but a fragment of Aristophanic comedy, we perceive that this song, which breaks off with an uproar of laughter, is the condemnation as well as the glory of the singer.

The translation of Agamemnon, the preface to which is dated "October 1st, 1877," was undertaken at the request or command of Carlyle. The argument of the preface fails to justify Browning's method. A translation "literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language" may be highly desirable; it is commonly called a "crib"; and a crib contrived by one who is not only a scholar but a man of genius will now and again yield a word or a phrase of felicitous precision. But that a translation "literal at every cost" should be put into verse is a wrong both to the original and to the poetry of the language to which the original is transferred; it assumes a poetic garb which in assuming it rends to tatters. A translation into verse implies that a certain beauty of form is part of the writer's aim; it implies that a poem is to be reproduced as a poem, and not as that bastard product of learned ill judgment—a glorified crib; and a glorified crib is necessarily a bad crib. Mrs Orr, who tells us that Browning refused to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of literary style, had no doubt that the translation of the Agamemnon was partly made for the pleasure of exposing the false claims made on their behalf. Such a supposition does not agree well with Browning's own Preface; but if he had desired to prove that the Agamemnon can be so rendered as to be barely readable, he has been singularly successful. From first to last in the genius of Browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of strange perversity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 103: Was this a "baffled visit," as described by Mr Henry James in his "Life of Story" (ii. 197), when the hostess was absent, and the guests housed in an inn?]

[Footnote 104: Letter quoted by Mrs Orr, p. 288.]

[Footnote 105: The attitude is reproduced in a photograph from which a woodcut is given in Mme. Blanc's article "A French Friend of Browning."]

[Footnote 106: "Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning," by Annie Ritchie, pp. 291, 292.]

[Footnote 107: "A Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning," by T.J. Wise, pp. 157, 158.]

[Footnote 108: Aristophanes' Apology is connected with these poems by its character as a casuistical self-defence of the chief speaker.]

[Footnote 109: North's "Plutarch," 1579, p. 599.]

[Footnote 110: "Les Deux Masques," ii. 281.]

[Footnote 111: A comment of Paul de Saint-Victor on the silence of the recovered Alkestis deserves to be quoted: "Hercule apprend a Admete qu'il lui est interdit d'entendre sa voix avant qu'elle soit purifiee de sa consecration aux Divinites infernales. J'aime mieux voir dans cette reserve un scrupule religieux du poete laissant a la morte sa dignite d'Ombre. Alceste a ete nitiee aux profonds mysteres de la mort; elle a vu l'invisible, elle a entendu l'ineffable; toute parole sortie de ses levres serait une divulgation sacrilege. Ce silence mysterieux la spiritualise et la rattache par un dernier lien au monde eternel."]



Chapter XIV

Problem and Narrative Poems

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, which appeared in December 1871, four months after the publication of Balaustions Adventure, was written by Browning during a visit to friends in Scotland. His interest in modern politics was considerable, but in general it remained remote from his work as a poet. He professed himself a liberal, but he was a liberal who because he was such, claimed the right of independent judgment. He had rejoiced in the enfranchisement of Italy. During the American Civil War he was strongly on the side of the North, as letters to Story, written when his private grief lay heavy upon him, abundantly show. He was at one time a friend of the movement in favour of granting the parliamentary suffrage to women, but late in life his opinion on this question altered. He was as decidedly opposed to the proposals for a separate or subordinate Parliament for Ireland as were his friends Carlyle and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. After the introduction of the Home Rule Bill he could not bring himself, though requested by a friend, to write words which would have expressed or implied esteem for the statesman who had made that most inopportune experiment in opportunism[112] and whose talents he admired. Yet for a certain kind of opportunism—that which conserves rather than destroys—Browning thought that much might fairly be said. To say this with a special reference to the fallen Emperor of France he wrote his Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

Browning's instinctive sympathies are not with the "Saviour of Society," who maintains for temporary reasons a tottering edifice. He naturally applauds the man who builds on sure foundations, or the man who in order to reach those foundations boldly removes the accumulated lumber of the past. But there are times when perhaps the choice lies only between conservation of what is imperfect and the attempt to erect an airy fabric which has no basis upon the solid earth; and Browning on the whole preferred a veritable civitas hominum, however remote from the ideal, to a sham civitas Dei or a real Cloudcuckootown. "It is true, that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things, which have long gone together, are as it were confederate within themselves; whereas new things piece not so well; but though they help by their utility, yet they trouble by their inconformity." These words, of one whose worldly wisdom was more profoundly studied than ever Browning's was, might stand as a motto for the poem. But the pregnant sentence of Bacon which follows these words should be added—"All this is true if time stood still." Browning's pleading is not a merely ingenious defence of the untenable, either with reference to the general thesis or its application to the French Empire. He did not, like his wife, think of the Emperor as if he were a paladin of modern romance; but he honestly believed that he had for a time done genuine service—though not the highest—to France and to the world. "My opinion of the solid good rendered years ago," he wrote in September 1863 to Story, "is unchanged. The subsequent deference to the clerical party in France and support of brigandage is poor work; but it surely is doing little harm to the general good." And to Miss Blagden after the publication of his poem: "I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, et pour cause; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made, and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the last miserable year." It seemed to Browning a case in which a veritable apologia was admissible in the interests of truth and justice, and by placing this apologia in the mouth of the Emperor himself certain sophistries were also legitimate that might help to give the whole the dramatic character which the purposes of poetry, as the exposition of a complex human character, required.

The misfortune was that in making choice of such a subject Browning condemned himself to write with his left hand, to fight with one arm pinioned, to exhibit the case on behalf of the "Saviour of Society" with his brain rather than with brain and heart acting together. He was to demonstrate that in the scale of spiritual colours there is a respectable place for drab. This may be undertaken with skill and vigour, but hardly with enthusiastic pleasure. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is an interesting intellectual exercise, and if this constitutes a poem, a poem it is; but the theme is fitter for a prose discussion. Browning's intellectual ability became a snare by which the poet within him was entrapped. The music that he makes here is the music of Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha:

So your fugue broadens and thickens, Greatens and deepens and lengthens, Till one exclaims—"But where's music, the dickens!"

The mysterious Sphinx who expounds his riddle and dissertates on himself in an imaginary Leicester Square says many things that deserve to be considered; but they are addressed to our understanding in the first instance, and only in a secondary and indirect way reach our feelings and our imagination. The interest of the poem is virtually exhausted in a single reading; to a true work of art we return again and again for renewed delight. We return to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau as to a valuable store-house of arguments or practical considerations in defence of a conservative opportunism; but if we have once appropriated these, we do not need the book. There is a spirit of conservation, like that of Edmund Burke, which has in it a wise enthusiasm, we might almost say a wise mysticism. Browning's Prince is not a conservator possessed by this enthusiasm. Something almost pathetic may be felt in his sense that the work allotted to him is work of mere temporary and transitory utility. He has no high inspirations such as support the men who change the face of the world. The Divine Ruler who has given him his special faculties, who has enjoined upon him his special tasks, holds no further communication with him. But he will do the work of a mere man in a man's strength, such as it is; he cannot make new things; he can use the thing he finds; he can for a term of years "do the best with the least change possible"; he can turn to good account what is already half-made; and so, he believes, he can, in a sense, co-operate with God. So long as he was an irresponsible dreamer, a mere voice in the air, it was permitted him to indulge in glorious dreams, to utter shining words. Now that his feet are on the earth, now that his thoughts convert themselves into deeds, he must accept the limitations of earth. The idealists may put forth this programme and that; his business is not with them but with the present needs of the humble mass of his people—"men that have wives and women that have babes," whose first demand is bread; by intelligence and sympathy he will effect "equal sustainment everywhere" throughout society; and when the man of genius who is to alter the world arises, such a man most of all will approve the work of his predecessor, who left him no mere "shine and shade" on which to operate, but the good hard substance of common human life.

All this is admirably put, and it is interesting to find that Browning, who had rejoiced with Herakles doing great deeds and purging the world of monsters, could also honour a poor provisional Atlas whose task of sustaining a poor imperfect globe upon his shoulders is less brilliant but not perhaps less useful. Nor would it be just to overlook the fact that in three or four pages the poet asserts himself as more than the prudent casuist. The splendid image of society as a temple from which winds the long procession of powers and beauties has in it something of the fine mysticism of Edmund Burke.[113] The record of the Prince's early and irresponsible aspirations for a free Italy—

Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever!—

with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of Mrs Browning.[114] And the characterisation of the genius of the French nation, whose lust for war and the glory of war Browning censures as "the dry-rot of the race," rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray surroundings:—

The people here, Earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride Above her pride i' the race all flame and air And aspiration to the boundless Great, The incommensurably Beautiful— Whose very faulterings groundward come of flight Urged by a pinion all too passionate For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow: Bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave Doers, exalt in Science, rapturous In Art, the—more than all—magnetic race To fascinate their fellows, mould mankind.

It is a passage conceived in the same spirit as the great chaunt "O Star of France!" written, at the same date, and with a recognition of both the virtues and the shames of France, by the American poet of Democracy. To these memorable fragments from Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau one other may be added—that towards the close of the poem which applies the tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of the Clitumnian god to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood of the world—"The new power slays the old, but handsomely."

In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau there is nothing enigmatical. "It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself," so Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume. Many persons, however, have supposed that in Fifine at the Fair (1872) a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer. When she comes to speak of this work Browning's biographer Mrs Orr is half-apologetic; it is for her "a piece of perplexing cynicism." The origin of the poem was twofold. The external suggestion came from the fact that during one of his visits to Pornic, Browning had seen the original of his Fifine, and she lived in his memory as a subject of intellectual curiosity and imaginative interest. The internal suggestion, as Mrs Orr hints, lay in a certain mood of resentment against himself arising from the fact that the encroachments of the world seemed to estrange in some degree a part of his complex being from entire fidelity to his own past. The world, in fact, seemed to be playing with Browning the part of a Fifine. If this were so, it would be characteristic of Browning that he should face round upon the world and come to an explanation with his adversary. But this could not in a printed volume be done in his own person; he was not one to take the public into his confidence. The discussion should be removed as far as possible from his own circumstances and even his own feelings. It should be a dramatic debate on the subject of fidelity and infidelity, on the bearings of the apparent to the true, on the relation of reality in this our mortal life to illusion. As he studied the subject it assumed new significances and opened up wider issues. An actual Elvire and an actual Fifine may be the starting points, but by-and-by Elvire shall stand for all that is permanent and substantial in thought and feeling, Fifine for all that is transitory and illusive. The question of conjugal fidelity is as much the subject of Fifine at the Fair as the virtue of tar-water is the subject of Berkeley's Siris. The poem is in fact Browning's Siris—a chain of thoughts and feelings, reaching with no break in the chain, from a humble basis to the heights of speculation.

But before all else Fifine at the Fair is a poem. Of all the longer poems which followed The Ring and the Book it is the most sustained and the most diversified in imaginative power. To point out passages of peculiar beauty, passages vivid in feeling, original in thought, would here be out of place; for the brilliance and vigour are unflagging, and what we have to complain of is the lack of some passages of repose. The joy in freedom—freedom accepting some hidden law—of these poor losels and truants from convention, who stroll it and stage it, the gypsy figure of Fifine in page-costume, the procession of imagined beauties—Helen, Cleopatra, the Saint of Pornic Church—the half-emerging, half-undelivered statue by Michelagnolo, the praise of music as nearer to the soul than words, sunset at Saint-Marie, the play of the body in the sea at noontide (with all that it typifies), woman as the rillet leaping to the sea, woman as the dolphin that upbears Orion, the Venetian carnival, which is the carnival of human life, darkness fallen upon the plains, and through the darkness the Druidic stones gleaming—all these are essentially parts of the texture of the poem, yet each has a lustre or a shimmer or grave splendour of its own.

It is strange that any reader should have supposed either the Prologue or the Epilogue to be uttered by the imaginary speaker of the poem. Both shadow forth the personal feelings of Browning; the prologue tells of the gladness he still found both in the world of imagination and the world of reality, over which hovers the spirit that had once been so near his own, the spirit that is near him still, yet moving on a different plane, perhaps wondering at or pitying this life of his, which yet he accepts with cheer and will turn to the best account; the epilogue veils behind its grim humour the desolate feeling that came upon him again and again as a householder in this house of life, for behind the happiness which he strenuously maintained, there lay a great desolation. But the last word of the epilogue—"Love is all and Death is nought" is a word of sustainment wrung out of sorrow. These poems have surely in them no "perplexing cynicism," nor has the poem enclosed between them, when it is seen aright. Browning's idea in the poem he declared in reply to a question of Dr Furnivall, "was to show merely how a Don Juan might justify himself, partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry." No more unhappy misnomer than this "Don Juan" could have been devised for the curious, ingenious, learned experimenter in life, no man of pleasure, in the vulgar sense of the word, but a deliberate explorer of thoughts and things, who argues out his case with so much fine casuistry and often with the justest conceptions of human character and conduct. If we could discover a dividing line between his truth and his sophistry, we might discover also that the poem is no exceptional work of Browning, for which an apology is required, but of a piece with his other writings and in harmony with the body of thought and feeling expressed through them. Now it is certain that as Browning advanced in years he more and more distrusted the results of the intellect in its speculative research; he relied more and more upon the knowledge that comes through or is embodied in love. Love by its very nature implies a relation; what is felt is real for us. But the intellect, which aspires to know things as they are, forever lands us in illusions—illusions needful for our education, and therefore far from unprofitable, to be forever replaced by fresh illusions; and the only truth we thus attain is the conviction that truth there assuredly is, that we must forever reach after it, and must forever grasp its shadow. Theologies, philosophies, scientific theories—these change like the shifting and shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of another shape and hue. But the knowledge involved in love is veritable and is verified at least for us who love. While in his practice he grew more scientific in research for truth, and less artistic in his desire for beauty, such was the doctrine which Browning upheld.

The speaker in Fifine at the Fair is far more a seeker for knowledge than he is a lover. And he has learnt, and learnt aright, that by illusions the intellect is thrown forward towards what may relatively be termed the truth; through shadows it advances upon reality. When he argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain, its Fifines the false which lead us onward to Elvire the true, he expresses an idea which Browning has repeatedly expressed in Ferishtah's Fancies and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his own. And if a man approaches the other sex primarily with a view to knowledge, with a view to confirm and to extend his own self-consciousness and to acquire experience of the strength and the weakness of womanhood, it is true that he will be instructed more widely, if not more deeply, by Elvire supplemented by Fifine than by Elvire alone. The sophistry of the speaker in Browning's poem consists chiefly in a juggle between knowledge and love, and in asserting as true of love what Browning held to be, in the profoundest sense, true of knowledge. The poet desires, as Butler in his "Analogy" desired, to take lower ground than his own; but the curious student of man and woman, of love and knowledge—imagination aiding his intellect—is compelled, amid his sophistical jugglings, to work out his problems upon Browning's own lines, and he becomes a witness to Browning's own conclusions. Saul, before the poem closes, is also among the prophets. For him, as for Browning, "God and the soul stand sure." He sees, as Browning sees, man reaching upward through illusions—religious theories, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses, artistic methods, scholarly attainments—to the Divine. The Pornic fair has become the Venice carnival, and this has grown to the vision of man's life, in which the wanton and coquette named a philosophy or a theology has replaced the gipsy in tricot. The speaker misapplies to love and the truths obtained by love Browning's doctrine concerning knowledge. And yet, even so, he is forced to confess, however inconsistent his action may be with his belief, that the permanent—which is the Divine—can be reached through a single, central point of human love, but not through any vain attempt to manufacture an infinite by piecing together a multitude of detached points:

His problem posed aright Was—"From a given point evolve the infinite!" Not—"Spend thyself in space, endeavouring to joint Together, and so make infinite, point and point: Fix into one Elvire a Fair-ful of Fifines!"

If he continues his experiments, they are experiments of the senses or of the intellect, which he knows can bring no profit to the heart: "Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant." He will undoubtedly—let this be frankly acknowledged—grow in a certain kind of knowledge, and as certainly he will dwindle in the higher knowledge that comes through love. The poem is neither enigmatical nor cynical, but in entire accord with Browning's own deepest convictions and highest feelings.[115]

Although in his later writings Browning rendered ever more and more homage to the illuminating power of the affections, his methods unfortunately became, as has been said, more and more scientific, or—shall we say?—pseudo-scientific. Art jealously selects its subjects, those which possess in a high degree spiritual or material beauty, or that more complete beauty which unites the two. Science accepts any subject which promises to yield its appropriate truth. Browning, probing after psychological truth, became too indifferent to the truth of beauty. Or shall we say that his vision of beauty became enlarged, so that in laying bare by dissection the anatomy of any poor corpse, he found an artistic joy in studying the enlacements of veins and nerves? To say this is perhaps to cheat oneself with words. His own defence would, doubtless, have been a development of two lines which occur near the close of Red Cotton Night-Cap Country:

Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.

And he would have pleaded that art, which he styles

The love of loving, rage Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things For truth's sake, whole and sole,

may "crush itself" for sake of the truth which is its end and aim. But the greatest masters have not sought for beauty merely or mainly in the dissection of ugliness, nor did they find their rejoicing in artistic suicide for the sake of psychological discovery. To Browning such a repulsive story as that of Red Cotton Night-Cap Country served now as well as one which in earlier days would have attracted him by its grandeur or its grace. Here was a fine morbid growth, an exemplary moral wen, the enormous product of two kinds of corruption—sensuality and superstition, and what could be a more fortunate field for exploration with aid of the scalpel? The incidents of the poem were historical and were recent. Antoine Mellerio, the sometime jeweller of Paris, had flung himself from his belvedere in 1870; the suit, which raised the question of his sanity at the date when his will had been signed, was closed in 1872; the scene of his death was close to Browning's place of summer sojourn, Saint-Aubin. The subject lay close to Browning's hand. It was an excellent subject for a short story of the kind that gets the name of realistic. It was an unfortunate subject for a long poem. But the botanist who desires to study vegetable physiology does not require a lily or a rose. Browning who viewed things from the ethical as well as the psychological standpoint was attracted to the story partly because it was, he thought, a story with a moral. He did not merely wish to examine as a spiritual chemist the action of Castilian blood upon a French brain, to watch and make a report upon the behaviour of inherited faith when brought into contact with acquired scepticism—the scepticism induced by the sensual temperament of the boulevards; he did not merely wish to exhibit the difficulties and dangers of a life divided against itself. His purpose was also to rebuke that romantic sentimentalism which would preserve the picturesque lumber of ruined faiths and discredited opinions, that have done their work, and remain only as sources of danger to persons who are weak of brain and dim of sight. Granted the conditions, it was, Browning maintains, an act of entire sanity on the part of his sorry hero, Monsieur Leonce Miranda, to fling himself into mid air, to put his faith to the final test, and trust to our Blessed Lady, the bespangled and bejewelled Ravissante, to bear him in safety through the air. But the conditions were deplorable; and those who declined to assist in carting away the rubbish of medievalism are responsible for Leonce Miranda's bloody night-cap.

The moral is just, and the story bears it well. Yet Browning's own conviction that man's highest and clearest faith is no more than a shadow of the unattainable truth may for a moment give us pause. An iconoclast, even such an iconoclast as Voltaire, is ordinarily a man of unqualified faith in the conclusions of the intellect. If our best conceptions of things divine be but a kind of parable, why quarrel with the parables accepted by other minds than our own? The answer is twofold. First Browning was not a sceptic with respect to the truths attained through love, and he held that mankind had already attained through love truths that condemned the religion of self-torture and terrified propitiations, which led Leonce Miranda to reduce his right hand and his left to carbonised stumps and dragged him kneeling along the country roads to manifest his devotion to the image of the Virgin. Secondly he held that our education through intellectual illusions is a progressive education, and that to seek to live in an obsolete illusion is treason against humanity. Therefore his exhortation is justified by his logic:

Quick conclude Removal, time effects so tardily, Of what is plain obstruction; rubbish cleared, Let partial-ruin stand while ruin may, And serve world's use, since use is manifold.

The tower which once served as a belfry may possibly be still of use to some Father Secchi to "tick Venus off in transit"; only never bring bell again to the partial-ruin,

To damage him aloft, brain us below, When new vibrations bury both in brick.

For which sane word, if not for all the pages of his poem, we may feel gratefully towards the writer. It is the word of Browning the moralist. The study of the double-minded hero belongs to Browning the psychologist. The admirable portrait of Clara, the successful adventuress, harlot and favoured daughter of the Church, is the chief gift received through this poem from Browning the artist. She is a very admirable specimen of her kind—the mamestra brassicae species of caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted the rapacious cousinry, Clara is seen at the last, under the protection of Holy Church, still quietly devouring her Miranda leaf—such is the irony of nature, and the merit of a perfect digestive apparatus.

The second narrative poem of this period, The Inn Album (1875), is in truth a short series of dramatic scenes, placed in a narrative frame-work. It is as concentrated as Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is diffuse; and the unities of time and place assist the tragic concentration. A recast of The Inn Album might indeed have appeared as a drama on the Elizabethan stage side by side with such a brief masterpiece, piteous and terrible, as "A Yorkshire Tragedy"; it moves with a like appalling rapidity towards the climax and the catastrophe. The incident of the attempted barter of a discarded mistress to clear off the score of a gambling debt is derived from the scandalous chronicle of English nineteenth century society.[116] Browning's tale of crime was styled on its appearance by a distinguished critic of Elizabethan drama the story of a "penny dreadful." He was right; but he should have added that some of the most impressive and elevated pieces of our dramatic literature have had sources of no greater dignity. The story of the "penny dreadful" is here rehandled and becomes a tragedy of which the material part is only a translation into external deed of a tragedy of the soul. The dramatis personae, as refashioned from the crude fact and the central passions of the poem, were such as would naturally call forth what was characteristic in Browning's genius. A martyr of love, a traitor to love, an avenger of love,—these are the central figures. The girlish innocence of the cousin is needed only as a ray of morning sunlight to relieve the eye that is strained and pained by the darkness and the pallor of the faces of the exponents of passion. And a like effect is produced by the glimpses of landscape, rich in the English qualities of cultured gladness and repose, which Browning so seldom presented, but which are perfectly rendered here:

The wooded watered country, hill and dale And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist, A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift O' the sun-touched dew.

We must feel that life goes on with leisurely happiness outside the little room that isolates its tragic occupants; the smoke from fires of turf and wood is in the air; cottagers are at their morning cookery. After all the poet of the inn album was well inspired in his eloquent address:—"Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!" and only certain incidents, which time will soon efface, have touched the salutation with irony.

In this poem Browning reverts to his earlier method of clearly and simply dividing the evil from the good. We are not embarrassed by the mingling of truth with sophistry; our instinctive sympathies are not held in check, but are on the contrary reinforced by the undisguised sympathies of the writer. We are no more in doubt where wrong and where justice lie than if Count Gismond were confronting Count Gauthier. The avenger, indeed, is no champion of romance; he is only a young English snob, a little slow of brain, a little unrefined in manner, a "clumsy giant handsome creature," who for a year has tried to acquire under an accomplished tutor the lore of cynical worldliness, and has not succeeded, for he is manly and honest, and has the gentleness of strength; "for ability, all's in the rough yet." Of his education the best part is that he has once loved and been thwarted in his love. And now in a careless-earnest regard for his cousin his need is that of occupation for his big, idle boy's heart; he wants something to do, someone also to serve. Browning wishes to show the passion of righteousness, which suddenly flames forth and abolishes an evil thing as springing from no peculiar knightly virtue but from mere honest human nature. The huge boy, somewhat crude, somewhat awkward, with a moral temper still unclarified, has enough of our good, common humanity in him to hold no parley with utter wickedness, when once he fully apprehends its nature; therefore he springs upon it in one swift transport of rage and there and then makes an end of it. His big red hands are as much the instruments of divine justice as is the axe of Ivan Ivanovitch.

The traitor of the poem is "refinement every inch from brow to boot-heel"; and in this respect it cannot be said that Browning's villain departs widely from the conventional, melodramatic villain of the stage. He has perhaps like the stage villain a little too much of that cheap knowingness, which is the theatrical badge of the complete man of the world, but which gentlemen in actual life do not ordinarily affect. There is here and elsewhere in Browning's later poetry somewhat too free an indulgence in this cheap knowingness, as if with a nod and a wink he would inform us that he has a man of the world's acquaintance with the shady side of life; and this is not quite good art, nor is it quite good manners. The vulgarity of the man in the street may have a redeeming touch of animal spirits, if not of naivete, in it; the vulgarity of the man in the club, "refinement every inch" is beyond redemption. The exhibition of Browning's traitor as having slipped lower and lower down the slopes of baseness because he has been false to his one experience of veritable love may remind us also of the melodramatic stage villain; but the tragic and pathetic motives of melodrama, its demonstrative heroisms, its stage generosities, its striking attitudes, are really fictions founded upon fact, and the facts which give some credit to the stage fictions remain for the true creator of tragedy to discover and interpret aright. The melodramatic is often the truth falsely or feebly handled; the same truth handled aright may become tragic. There is much in Shakespeare's plays which if treated by an inferior artist would at once sink from tragedy to melodrama. Browning escapes from melodrama but not to such a safe position that we can quite forget its neighbourhood. When the traitor of this poem is withdrawn—as was Guido—

Into that sad obscure sequestered state Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain,

there will be found in him that he knew the worth of love, that he saw the horror of the void in which he lived, and that for a moment—though too late—a sudden wave of not ignoble passion overwhelmed his baser self, even if only to let the fangs of the treacherous rock reappear in their starkness and cruelty.

The lady, again, with her superb statue-like beauty, her low wide brow

Oppressed by sweeps of hair Darker and darker as they coil and swathe The crowned corpse-wanness whence the eyes burn black,

her passion, her despair, her recovery through chilling to ice the heart within her, her reawakening to life, and the pain of that return to sensation, her measureless scorn of her betrayer, her exposure of his last fraud, and her self-sought death—the lady is dangerously near the melodramatic heroine, and yet she is not a melodramatic but a tragic figure. Far more than Pompilia, who knew the joy of motherhood, is she the martyr of love. And yet, before she quits life, in her protective care of that somewhat formidable, somewhat ungainly baby, the huge boy, her champion, hero and snob, she finds a comforting maternal instinct at work:

Did you love me once? Then take love's last and best return! I think Womanliness means only motherhood; All love begins and ends there,—roams enough, But, having run the circle, rests at home.

Her husband, good man, will not suffer acutely for her loss; he will be true to duty, and continue to dose his flock with the comfortable dogma of hell-fire, in which not one of them believes.

The Pacchiarotto volume of 1876 was the first collection of miscellaneous poetry put forth by Browning since the appearance, twelve years previously, of Dramatis Personae[117] There is, of course, throughout the whole the presence of a vigorous personality; we can in an occasional mood tumble and toss even in the rough verse of Pacchiarotto, as we do on a choppy sea on which the sun is a-shine, and which invigorates while it—not always agreeably—bobs our head, and dashes down our throat. But vigour alone does not produce poetry, and it may easily run into a kind of good-humoured effrontery. The speciality of the volume as compared with its predecessors is that it contains not a little running comment by Browning upon himself and his own work, together with a jocular-savage reply to his unfriendly critics. There is a little too much in all this of the robustious Herakles sending his great voice before him. An author ought to be aware of the fact that no pledge to admire him and his writings has been administered to every one who enters the world, and that as sure as he attracts, so surely must he repel. In the Epilogue the poet informs his readers that those who expect from him, or from any poet, strong wine of verse which is also sweet demand the impossible. Sweet the strong wine can become only after it has long lain mellowing in the cask. The experience of Browning's readers contradicted the assertion. Some who drank the good wines of 1855 and of 1864 in the year of the vintages found that they were strong and needed no keeping to be sweet. Wine-tasters must make distinctions, and the quality of the yield of 1876 does not entitle it to be remembered as an extraordinary year.

The poem from which the volume was named tells in verse, "timed by raps of the knuckle," how the painter Pacchiarotto must needs become a world-reformer, or at least a city-reformer in his distressed Siena, with no good results for his city and with disastrous results for himself. He learns by unsavoury experience his lesson, to hold on by the paint-brush and maul-stick, and do his own work, accepting the mingled evil and good of life in a spirit of strenuous—not indolent—laissez-faire, playing, as energetically as a human being can, his own part, and leaving others to play theirs, assured that for all and each this life is the trial-time and test of eternity, the rehearsal for the performance in a future world, and "Things rarely go smooth at Rehearsal." Browning's joy in difficult rhyming as seen in this serio-grotesque jingle was great; some readers may be permitted to wish that many of his rhymes were not merely difficult but impossible. At a dinner given by Sir Leslie Stephen he met successfully the challenge to produce a rhyme for "rhinoceros," and for Tennyson's diversion he delivered himself of an impromptu in which rhymes were found for "Ecclefechan" and "Craigenputtock." But in rhyming ingenuity Browning is inferior to the author of "Hudibras," in a rhymer's elegant effrontery he is inferior to the author of "Don Juan." Browning's good-humoured effrontery in his rhymes expects too much good-humour from his reader, who may be amiable enough to accept rough and ready successes, but cannot often be delighted by brilliant gymnastics of sound and sense. In like manner it asks for a particularly well-disposed reader to appreciate the wit of Browning's retort upon his critics: "You are chimney-sweeps," he sings out in his great voice, "listen! I have invented several insulting nicknames for you. Decamp! or my housemaid will fling the slops in your faces." This may appear to some persons to be genial and clever. It certainly has none of the exquisite malignity of Pope's poisoned rapier. Perhaps it is a little dull; perhaps it is a little outrageous.

The Browning who masks as Shakespeare in At the Mermaid disclaims the ambition of heading a poetical faction, condemns the Byronic Welt-schmerz, and announces his resolvedly cheerful acceptance of life. Elsewhere he assures his readers that though his work is theirs his life is his own; he will not unlock his heart in sonnets. Such is the drift of the verses entitled House; a peep through the window is permitted, but "please you, no foot over threshold of mine." This was not Shakespeare's wiser way; if he hid himself behind his work, it was with the openness and with the taciturnity of Nature. He did not stand in the window of his "House" declaring that he was not to be seen; he did not pull up and draw down the blind to make it appear that he was at home and not at home. In the poem Shop Browning continues his assurances that he is no Eglamor to whom verse is "a temple-worship vague and vast." Verse-making is his trade as jewel-setting and jewel-selling is the goldsmith's—but do you suppose that the poet lives no life of his own?—how and where it is not for you to guess, only be certain it is far away from his counter and his till. These poems were needless confidences to the public that no confidences would be vouchsafed to them.

But the volume of 1876 contains better work than these pieces of self-assertion. The two love-lyrics Natural Magic and Magical Nature have each of them a surprise of beauty; the one tells of the fairy-tale of love, the other of its inward glow and gem-like stability. Bifurcation is characteristic of the writer; the woman who chooses duty rather than love may have done well, but she has chosen the easier way and perhaps has evaded the probation of life; the man who chooses passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the harder course and perhaps the better. Which of the two was sinner? which was saint? To be impeccable may be the most damning of offences. In St Martin's Summer the eerie presence of ghosts of dead loves, haunting a love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that is defeat. Fears and Scruples is a confession of the trials of theistic faith in a world from which God seems to be an absentee. What had been supposed to be letters from our friend are proved forgeries; what we called his loving actions are the accumulated results of the natural law of heredity. Yet even if theism had to be abandoned, it would have borne fruit:

All my days I'll go the softlier, sadlier For that dream's sake! How forget the thrill Through and through me as I thought "The gladlier Lives my friend because I love him still?"

And the friend will value love all the more which persists through the obstacles of partial ignorance.[118] The blank verse monologue A Forgiveness, Browning's "Spanish Tragedy," is a romance of passion, subtle in its psychology, tragic in its action. Out of its darkness gleams especially one resplendent passage—the description of those weapons of Eastern workmanship—

Horror coquetting with voluptuousness—

one of which is the instrument chosen by the husband's hatred, now replacing his contempt, to confer on his wife a death that is voluptuous. The grim-grotesque incident from the history of the Jews in Italy related in Filippo Baldinucci recalls the comedy and the pathos of Holy Cross Day, to which it is in every respect inferior. The Jew of the centuries of Christian persecution is for Browning's imagination a being half-sublime and half-grotesque, and wholly human. Cenciaja, a note in verse connected with Shelley's Cenci, would be excellent as a note in prose appended to the tragedy, explaining, as it does, why the Pope, inclining to pardon Beatrice, was turned aside from his purposes of mercy; it rather loses than gains in value by having been thrown into verse. To recover our loyalty to Browning as a poet, which this volume sometimes puts to the test, we might well reserve Numpholeptos for the close. The pure and disempassioned in womanly form is brought face to face with the passionate and sullied lover, to whom her charm is a tyranny; she is no warm sun but a white moon rising above this lost Endymion, who never slumbers but goes forth on hopeless quests at the bidding of his mistress, and wins for all his reward the "sad, slow, silver smile," which is now pity, now disdain, and never love. The subjugating power of chaste and beautiful superiority to passion over this mere mortal devotee is absolute and inexorable. Is the nymph an abstraction and incarnation of something that may be found in womanhood? Is she an embodiment of the Ideal, which sends out many questers, and pities and disdains them when they return soiled and defeated? Soft and sweet as she appears, she is La belle Dame sans merci, and her worshipper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of Keats's poem.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 112: See Morley's "Life of Gladstone," vol. iii. p. 417.]

[Footnote 113: Pages 46, 47 of the first edition.]

[Footnote 114: Pages 58-60.]

[Footnote 115: It may here be noted that Dante Rossetti in a morbid mood supposed that certain passages of Fifine were directed against himself; and so ceased his friendship with Browning.]

[Footnote 116: Fanny Kemble also derived from the story of Lord De Ros the subject of her "English Tragedy."]

[Footnote 117: Some sentences in what follows are taken from a notice of the volume which I wrote on its appearance for The Academy.]

[Footnote 118: See Browning's letter to Mr Kingsland in "Robert Browning" by W. G. Kingsland (1890), pp. 32, 33.]



Chapter XV

Solitude and Society

The volume which consists of La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.[119] La Saisiaz, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to the summit of Saleve after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. In reading it we discern the tall white figure of the "stranger lady," leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path which she had loved and called her own. It serves Browning's purpose in the poem that she should have been one of those persons who in this world have not manifested all that lies within them. Does she still exist, or is she now no more than the thing which lies in the little enclosure at Collonge? The poem after its solemn and impressive prelude becomes the record of an hour's debate of the writer with himself—a debate which has a definite aim and is brought to a definite issue. In conducting that debate on immortality, Browning is neither Christian nor anti-Christian. The Christian creed involves a question of history; he cannot here admit historical considerations; he will see the matter out as he is an individual soul, on the grounds suggested by his individual consciousness and his personal knowledge. It may be that any result he arrives at is a result for himself alone.

But why conduct an argument in verse? Is not prose a fitter medium for such a discussion? The answer is that the poem is more than an argument; it is the record in verse of an experience, the story of a pregnant and passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that resistance by the heart itself. Such an hour is full of events; it may be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas. The frame and setting of the discussion also are more than frame and setting; they co-operate with the thoughts; they form part of the experience. The poet is alone among the mountains, with dawn and sunset for associates, Jura thrilled to gold at sunrise, Saleve in its evening rose-bloom, Mont-Blanc which strikes greatness small; or at night he is beneath the luminous worlds which

One by one came lamping—chiefly that prepotency of Mars.

While he climbs towards the summit he is aware of "Earth's most exquisite disclosures, heaven's own God in evidence"; he stands face to face with Nature—"rather with Infinitude." All through his mountain ascent the vigour of life is aroused within him; and, as he returns—there is her grave.

The idea of a future life, for which this earthly life serves as an education and a test, is so central with Browning, so largely influences all his feelings and penetrates all his art, that it is worth while to attend to the course of his argument and the nature of his conclusion. He puts the naked question to himself—What does death mean? Is it total extinction? Is it a passage into life?—without any vagueness, without any flattering metaphor; he is prepared to accept or endure any answer if only it be the truth. Whether his discussion leads to a trustworthy result or not, the sincerity and the energy of his endeavour after truth serve to banish all supine and half-hearted moods. The debate, of which his poem is a report, falls into two parts: first, a statement of facts; secondly, a series of conjectures—conjectures and no more—rising from the basis of facts that are ascertained. To put the question, "Shall I survive death?" is to assume that I exist and that something other than myself exists which causes me now to live and presently to die. The nature of this power outside myself I do not know; we may for convenience call it "God." Beyond these two facts—myself and a power environing me—nothing is known with certainty which has any bearing on the matter in dispute. I am like a floating rush borne onward by a stream; whither borne the rush cannot tell; but rush and stream are facts that cannot be questioned.

Knowing that I exist—Browning goes on—I know what for me is pain and what is pleasure. And, however it may be with others, for my own part I can pronounce upon the relation of joy to sorrow in this my life on earth:—

I must say—or choke in silence——"Howsoever came my fate, Sorrow did and joy did nowise—life well weighed—preponderate."

If this failure be ordained by necessity, I shall bear it as best I can; but, if this life be all, nothing shall force me to say that life has proceeded from a cause supreme in goodness, wisdom, and power. What I find here is goodness always intermixed with evil; wisdom which means an advance from error to the confession of ignorance; power that is insufficient to adapt a human being to his surroundings even in the degree in which a worm is fitted to the leaf on which it feeds.

Browning tacitly rejects the idea that the world is the work of some blind, force; and undoubtedly our reason, which endeavours to reduce all things in nature to rational conceptions, demands that we should conceive the world as rational rather than as some wild work of chance. Upon one hypothesis, and upon one alone, can the life of man upon this globe appear the result of intelligence:

I have lived then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught This—there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught, Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim, If (to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!) If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place, And life, time,—with all their chances, changes,—just probation—space, Mine for me.

Grant this hypothesis, and all changes from irrational to rational, from evil to good, from pain to a strenuous joy:—

Only grant a second life, I acquiesce In this present life as failure, count misfortune's worst assaults Triumph, not defeat, assured that loss so much the more exalts Gain about to be.

Thus out of defeat springs victory; never are we so near to knowledge as when we are checked at the bounds of ignorance; beauty is felt through its opposite; good is known through evil; truth shows its potency when it is confronted by falsehood;

While for love—Oh how but, losing love, does whoso loves succeed By the death-pang to the birth-throe—learning what is love indeed?

Yet at best this idea of a future life remains a conjecture, an hypothesis, a hope, which gives a key to the mysteries of our troubled earthly state. Browning proceeds to argue that such a hope is all that we can expect or ought to desire. The absolute assurance of a future life and of rewards and punishments consequent on our deeds in the present world would defeat the very end for which, according to the hypothesis, we are placed here; it would be fatal to the purpose of our present life considered as a state of probation. What such a state of probation requires is precisely what we have—hope; no less than this and no more. Does our heaven overcloud because we lack certainty? No:

Hope the arrowy, just as constant, comes to pierce its gloom, compelled By a power and by a purpose which, if no one else beheld, I behold in life, so—hope!

Such is the conclusion with Browning of the whole matter. It is in entire accordance with a letter which he wrote two years previously to a lady who supposed herself to be dying, and who had thanked him for help derived from his poems: "All the help I can offer, in my poor degree, is the assurance that I see ever more reason to hold by the same hope—and that by no means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the contrary.... God bless you, sustain you, and receive you." To Dr Moncure Conway, who had lost a son, Browning wrote: "If I, who cannot, would restore your son, He who can, will." And Mr Rudolph Lehmann records his words in conversation: "I have doubted and denied it [a future life], and I fear have even printed my doubts; but now I am as deeply convinced that there is something after death. If you ask me what, I no more know it than my dog knows who and what I am. He knows that I am there and that is enough for him."[120]

Browning's confession in La Saisias that the sorrow of his life outweighed its joy is not inconsistent with his habitual cheerfulness of manner. Such estimates as this are little to be trusted. One great shock of pain may stand for ever aloof from all other experiences; the pleasant sensations of many days pass from our memory. We cannot tell. But that Browning supposed himself able to tell is in itself worthy of note. In The Two Poets of Croisic, which was written in London immediately after La Saisiaz, and which, though of little intrinsic importance, shows that Browning was capable of a certain grace in verse that is light, he pleads that the power of victoriously dealing with pain and transforming it into strength may be taken as the test of a poet's greatness:

Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear, Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race.

This is good counsel for art; but not wholly wise counsel for life. Sorrow, indeed, is not wronged by a cheerfulness cultivated and strenuously maintained; but gladness does suffer a certain wrong. Sunshine comes and goes; the attempt to substitute any unrelieved light for sunshine is somewhat of a failure at the best. Shadows and brightness pursuing each other according to the course of nature make more for genuine happiness than does any stream of moral electricity worked from a dynamo of the will. It is pleasanter to encounter a breeze that sinks and swells, that lingers and hastens, than to face a vigorous and sustained gale even of a tonic quality. Browning's unfailing cheer and cordiality of manner were admirable; they were in part spontaneous, in part an acceptance of duty, in part a mode of self-protection; they were only less excellent than the varying moods of a simple and beautiful nature.

When La Saisiaz appeared Browning was sixty-six years old. He lived for more than eleven years longer, during which period he published six volumes of verse, showing new powers as a writer of brief poetic narrative and as a teacher through parables; but he produced no single work of prolonged and sustained effort—which perhaps was well. His physical vigour continued for long unabated. He still enjoyed the various pleasures and excitements of the London season; but it is noted by Mrs Orr that after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith he "almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him." His daily habits were of the utmost regularity, varying hardly at all from week to week. He was averse, says Mrs Orr, "to every hought of change," and chose rather to adapt himself to external conditions than to enter on the effort of altering them; "what he had done once he was wont, for that very reason, to continue doing." A few days after Browning's death a journalist obtained from a photographer, Mr Grove, who had formerly been for seven years in Browning's service, the particulars as to how an ordinary day during the London season went by at Warwick Crescent. Browning rose without fail at seven, enjoyed a plate of whatever fruit—strawberries, grapes, oranges—were in season; read, generally some piece of foreign literature, for an hour in his bedroom; then bathed; breakfasted—a light meal of twenty minutes; sat by the fire and read his Times and Daily News till ten; from ten to one wrote in his study or meditated with head resting on his hand. To write a letter was the reverse of a pleasure to him, yet he was diligent in replying to a multitude of correspondents. His lunch, at one, was of the lightest kind, usually no more than a pudding. Visits, private views of picture exhibitions and the like followed until half-past five. At seven he dined, preferring Carlowitz or claret to other wines, and drinking little of any. But on many days the dinner was not at home; once during three successive weeks he dined out without the omission of a day. He returned home seldom at a later hour than half-past twelve; and at seven next morning the round began again. During his elder years, says Mr Grove, he took little interest in politics. He was not often a church-goer, but discussed religious matters earnestly with his clerical friends. He loved not only animals but flowers, and when once a Virginia creeper entered the study window at Warwick Crescent, it was not expelled but trained inside the room. To his servants he was a considerate friend rather than a master.

So far Mr Grove as reported in the Pall Mall Gazette (Dec 16, 1889).

Many persons have attempted to describe Browning as he appeared in society; there is a consensus of opinion as to the energy and cordiality of his way of social converse; but it is singular that, though some records of his out-pourings as a talker exist, very little is on record that possesses permanent value. Perhaps the best word that can be quoted is that remembered by Sir James Paget—Browning's recommendation of Bach's "Crucifixus—et sepultus—et resurrexit" as a cure for want of belief. He did not fling such pointed shafts as those of Johnson which still hang and almost quiver where they struck. His energy did not gather itself up into sentences but flowed—and sometimes foamed—in a tide. Cordial as he was, he could be also vehemently intolerant, and sometimes perhaps where his acquaintance with the subject of his discourse was not sufficient to warrant a decided opinion.[121] He appeared, says his biographer, "more widely sympathetic in his works than in his life"; with no moral selfishness he was, adds Mrs Orr, intellectually self-centred; and unquestionably the statement is correct. He could suffer fools, but not always gladly. Speaking of earlier days in Italy, T.A. Trollope observes that, while he was never rough or discourteous even to the most exasperating fool, "the men used to be rather afraid of Browning." His cordiality was not insincere; but it belonged to his outer, not his inner self. With the exception of Milsand, he appears to have admitted no man to his heart, though he gave a portion of his intellect to many. His friends, in the more intimate sense of the word, were women, towards whom his feeling was that of comradeship and fraternal affection without over-much condescension or any specially chivalric sentiment. When early in their acquaintance Miss Barrett promised Browning that he would find her "an honest man on the whole," she understood her correspondent, who valued a good comrade of the other sex, and had at the same time a vivid sense of the fact that such a comrade was not so unfortunate as to be really a man.

Let witnesses be cited and each give his fragment of evidence. Mr W.J. Stillman, an excellent observer, was specially impressed in his intercourse with Browning, by the mental health and robustness of a nature sound to the core; "an almost unlimited intellectual vitality, and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armour, but with no aggressiveness."[122] A writer in the first volume of The New Review, described Browning as a talker in general society so faithfully that it is impossible to improve on what he has said: "It may safely be alleged," he writes, "that no one meeting Mr Browning for the first time, and unfurnished with a clue, would guess his vocation. He might be a diplomatist, a statesman, a discoverer, or a man of science. But, whatever were his calling, we should feel that it must be essentially practical.... His conversation corresponds to his appearance. It abounds in vigour, in fire, in vivacity. Yet all the time it is entirely free from mystery, vagueness, or technical jargon. It is the crisp, emphatic and powerful discourse of a man of the world, who is incomparably better informed than the mass of his congeners. Mr Browning is the readiest, the blithest, and the most forcible of talkers. Like the Monsignore in Lothair he can 'sparkle with anecdote and blaze with repartee,' and when he deals in criticism the edge of his sword is mercilessly whetted against pretension and vanity. The inflection of his voice, the flash of his eye, the pose of his head, the action of his hand, all lend their special emphasis to the condemnation." The mental quality which most impressed Mr W.M. Rossetti in his communications with Browning was, he says, "celerity "—"whatever he had to consider or speak about, he disposed of in the most forthright style." His method was of the greatest directness; "every touch told, every nail was hit on the head." He was not a sustained, continuous speaker, nor exactly a brilliant one; "but he said something pleasant and pointed on whatever turned up; ... one felt his mind to be extraordinarily rich, while his facility, accessibility, and bonhomie, softened but did not by any means disguise the sense of his power."[123] Browning's discourse with a single person who was a favoured acquaintance was, Mr Gosse declares, "a very much finer phenomenon than when a group surrounded him." Then "his talk assumed the volume and the tumult of a cascade. His voice rose to a shout, sank to a whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational melody.... In his own study or drawing-room, what he loved was to capture the visitor in a low arm-chair's "sofa-lap of leather", and from a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk round the victim, in front, behind, on this side, on that, weaving magic circles, now with gesticulating arms thrown high, now grovelling on the floor to find some reference in a folio, talking all the while, a redundant turmoil of thoughts, fancies, and reminiscences flowing from those generous lips."[124]

Mr Henry James in his "Life of Story"[125] is less pictorial, but he is characteristically subtle in his rendering of the facts. He brings us back, however, to Browning as seen in society. He speaks of the Italian as a comparatively idyllic period which seemed to be "built out," though this was not really the case, by the brilliant London period. It was, he says, as if Browning had divided his personal consciousness into two independent compartments. The man of the world "walked abroad, showed himself, talked, right resonantly, abounded, multiplied his connections, did his duty." The poet—an inscrutable personage—"sat at home and knew, as well he might, in what quarters of that sphere to look for suitable company." "The poet and the 'member of society' were, in a word, dissociated in him as they can rarely elsewhere have been.... The wall that built out the idyll (as we call it for convenience) of which memory and imagination were virtually composed for him, stood there behind him solidly enough, but subject to his privilege of living almost equally on both sides of it. It contained an invisible door, through which, working the lock at will, he could softly pass, and of which he kept the golden key—carrying about the same with him even in the pocket of his dinner waistcoat, yet even in his most splendid expansions showing it, happy man, to none." Tennyson, said an acquaintance of Miss Anna Swanwick, "hides himself behind his laurels, Browning behind the man of the world." She declares that her experience was more fortunate; that she seldom heard Browning speak without feeling that she was listening to the poet, and that on more than one occasion he spoke to her of his wife[126]. But many witnesses confirm the impression which is so happily put into words by Mr Henry James. The "member of society" protected the privacy of the poet. The questions remain whether the poet did not suffer from such protection; whether, beside the superfluous forces which might be advantageously disposed of at the drawing-board or in thumping wet clay, some of the forces proper to the poet were not drawn away and dissipated by the incessant demands of Society; whether while a sufficient fund of energy for the double life was present with Browning, the peculiar energy of the poet did not undergo a certain deterioration. The doctrine of the superiority of the heart to the intellect is more and more preached in Browning's poetry; but the doctrine itself is an act of the intellect. The poet need not perhaps insist on the doctrine if he creates—as Browning did in earlier years—beautiful things which commend themselves, without a preacher, to our love.

In the autumn of 1878, after seventeen years of absence from Italy, Browning was recaptured by its charm, and henceforward to the close of his life Venice and the Venetian district became his accustomed place of summer refreshment and repose. For a time, with his sister as his companion, he paused at a hotel near the summit of the Spluegen, enjoyed the mountain air, walked vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity, says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, Ivan Ivanovitch. When a boy he had read in Bunyan's "Life and Death of Mr Badman" the story of "Old Tod", and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale the highly unidyllic "idyl" of English life, Ned Bratts. It was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "There comes up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "some subject for poetry, which has been dormant, and apparently dead, for perhaps dozens of years. A month since I wrote a poem of some two hundred lines ['Donald'] about a story I heard more than forty years ago, and never dreamed of trying to repeat, wondering how it had so long escaped me; and so it has been with my best things."[127] Before the close of September the travellers were in a rough but pleasant albergo at Asolo, which Browning had not seen since his first Italian journey more than forty years previously. "Such things," he writes, "have begun and ended with me in the interval!" Changes had taken place in the little city; yet much seemed familiar and therefore the more dreamlike. The place had indeed haunted him in his dreams; he would find himself travelling with a friend, or some mysterious stranger, when suddenly the little town sparkling in the sunshine would rise before him. "Look! look there is Asolo," he would cry, "do let us go there!" And always, after the way of dreams, his companions would declare it impossible and he would be hurried away.[128] From the time that he actually saw again the city that he loved this recurring dream was to come no more. He wandered through the well-known places, and seeking for an echo in the Rocca, the ruined fortress above the town, he found that it had not lost its tongue. A fortnight at Venice in a hotel where quiet and coolness were the chief attractions, prepared the way for many subsequent visits to what he afterwards called "the dearest place in the world." Everything in Venice, says Mrs Bronson, charmed him: "He found grace and beauty in the popolo whom he paints so well in the Goldoni sonnet. The poorest street children were pretty in his eyes. He would admire a carpenter or a painter, who chanced to be at work in the house, and say to me 'See the fine poise of the head ... those well-cut features. You might fancy that man in the crimson robe of a Senator as you see them in Tintoret's canvas.'"