But these are reminiscences of later days. It was in 1880 that Browning made the acquaintance of his American friend Mrs Arthur Bronson, whose kind hospitalities added to the happiness of his visits to Asolo and to Venice, who received, as if it were a farewell gift, the dedication of his last volume, and who, not long before her death in 1901, published interesting articles on "Browning in Asolo" and "Browning in Venice" in The Century Magazine. The only years in which he did not revisit Venice were 1882, 1884 and 1886, and in each of these years his absence was occasioned by some unforeseen mis-adventure. In 1882 the floods were out, and he proceeded no farther than Verona. Could he have overcome the obstacles and reached Venice, he feared that he might have been incapable of enjoying it. For the first time in his life he was lamed by what he took for an attack of rheumatism, "caught," he says, "just before leaving St Pierre de Chartreuse, through my stupid inadvertence in sitting with a window open at my back—reading the Iliad, all my excuse!—while clad in a thin summer suit, and snow on the hills and bitterness every where."[129] In 1884 his sister's illness at first forbade travel to so considerable a distance. The two companions were received by another American friend, Mrs Bloomfield Moore, at the Villa Berry, St Moritz, and when she was summoned across the Atlantic, at her request they continued to occupy her villa. The season was past; the place deserted; but the sun shone gloriously. "We have walked every day," Browning wrote at the end of September, "morning and evening—afternoon I should say—two or three hours each excursion, the delicious mountain air surpassing any I was ever privileged to breathe. My sister is absolutely herself again, and something over: I was hardly in want of such doctoring."[130] Two years later Miss Browning was ailing again, and they did not venture farther than Wales. At the Hand Hotel, Llangollen, they were at no great distance from Brintysilio, the summer residence of their friends Sir Theodore and Lady Martin—in earlier days the Lady Carlisle and Colombe of Browning's plays.[131] Mrs Orr notices that Browning, Liberal as he declared himself, was now very favourably impressed by the services to society of the English country gentleman. "Talk of abolishing that class of men!" he exclaimed, "they are the salt of the earth!" She adds, as worthy of remark, that he attended regularly the afternoon Sunday service in the parish church at Llantysilio, where now a tablet of Lady Martin's placing marks the spot. Churchgoing was not his practice in London; "but I do not think," says Mrs Orr, "he ever failed in it at the Universities or in the country." At Venice it was his custom to be present with his sister at the services of a Waldensian chapel, where "a certain eloquent pastor," as Mrs Bronson describes him, was the preacher. A year before his death Browning in a letter to Lady Martin recalls the happy season in the Vale of Llangollen—"delightful weeks—each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church leading to the House Beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably."



Before passing on to Venice, where repose was mingled with excitement, Browning was accustomed to seek a renewal of physical energy, after the fatigues of London, in some place not too much haunted by the English tourist, where he could walk for hours in the clear mountain air. In 1881 and 1882 it was St Pierre de Chartreuse, from which he visited the Grande Chartreuse, and heard the midnight mass; in 1883 and 1885 it was Gressoney St Jean in the Val d'Aosta—the "delightful Gressoney" of the Prologue to Ferishtah's Fancies, where "eggs, milk, cheese, fruit" sufficed "for gormandizing"; in 1888 it was the yet more beautiful Primiero, near Feltre. In the previous year he had, for the second time, stayed at St Moritz. These were seasons of abounding life. St Pierre was only "a wild little clump of cottages on a mountain amid loftier mountains," with the roughest of little inns for its hotel; but its primitive arrangements suited Browning well and were bravely borne by his sister.[132] From Gressoney in September 1885 he wrote: "We are all but alone, the brief 'season' being over, and only a chance traveller turning up for a fortnight's lodging. We take our walks in the old way; two and a half hours before breakfast, three after it, in the most beautiful country I know. Yesterday the three hours passed without our meeting a single man, woman, or child; one man only was discovered at a distance at the foot of a mountain we had climbed."[133] All things pleased him; an August snowstorm at St Moritz was made amends for by "the magnificence of the mountain and its firs black against the universal white"; it served moreover as an illustration of a passage in the Iliad, the only book that accompanied him from England: "The days glide away uneventfully, nearly, and I breathe in the pleasant idleness at every pore. I have no few acquaintances here—nay, some old friends—but my intimates are the firs on the hillside, and the myriad butterflies all about it, every bright wing of them under the snow to-day, which ought not to have been for a fortnight yet."[134] And from Primiero in 1888, when his strength had considerably declined, a letter tells of unabated pleasure; of mountains "which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold," with at times a silver change; of the valley "one green luxuriance"; of the tiger-lilies in the garden above ten feet high, every bloom and every leaf faultless; and of the captive fox, "most engaging of little vixens," who, to Browning's great joy, broke her chain and escaped.[135] As each successive volume that he published seemed to him his best, so of his mountain places of abode the last always was the loveliest.

At Venice for a time the quiet Albergo dell' Universo suited Browning and his sister well, but when Mrs Bronson pressed them to accept the use of a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati and the kind offer was accepted, the gain was considerable; and the Palazzo has historical associations dating from the fifteenth century which pleased Browning's imagination. It was his habit to rise early, and after a light breakfast to visit the Public Gardens with his sister. He had many friends—Mrs Bronson is our informant—whose wants or wishes he bore in mind—the prisoned elephant, the baboon, the kangaroo, the marmosets, the pelicans, the ostrich; three times, with strict punctuality, he made his rounds, and then returned to his apartment. At noon appeared the second and more substantial breakfast, at which Italian dishes were preferred. Browning wrote passionately against the vivisection of animals, and strenuously declaimed against the decoration of a lady's hat with the spoils of birds—

Clothed with murder of His best Of harmless beings.

He praised God—for pleasure as he teaches us is praise—by heartily enjoying ortolans, "a dozen luscious lumps" provided by the cook of the Giustiniani-Recanati palace; to vary his own phrasing, he was

Fed with murder of His best Of harmless beings,

and laughed, innocently enough, with his good sister over the delicious "mouthfuls for cardinals."[136] As if the pleasure of the eye in beauty gained at a bird's expense were more criminal than the gusto of the tongue in lusciousness, curbed by piquancy, gained at the expense of a dozen other birds! At three o'clock came the gondola, and it was often directed to the Lido. "I walk, even in wind and rain, for a couple of hours on Lido," Browning wrote when nearly seventy, "and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand as much as Shelley did in those old days."[137] And to another friend: "You don't know how absolutely well I am after my walking, not on the mountains merely, but on the beloved Lido. Go there, if only to stand and be blown about by the sea wind."[138] At one time he even talked of completing an unfinished villa on the Lido from which "the divine sunsets" could be seen, but the dream-villa faded after the manner of such dreams. Sunsets, however, and sunrises never faded from Browning's brain. "I will not praise a cloud however bright," says Wordsworth, although no one has praised them more ardently than he. From Pippa's sunrise to the sunrises of mornings when his life drew towards its close, Browning lavished his praise upon the scenery of the sky. A passage quoted by Mrs Orr from a letter written a little more than a year before his death is steeped in colour; when Pippa Passes becomes the prey of the annotating editor it will illuminate his page: "Every morning at six I see the sun rise.... My bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few sea-gulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins." The sea-gulls of which this extract speaks were, Mrs Bronson tells us, a special delight to Browning. On a day of gales "he would stand at the window and watch them as they sailed to and fro, a sure sign of heavy storms in the Adriatic." To him, as he declared, they were even more interesting than the doves of St Mark.

Sometimes his walks, guided by Mrs Bronson's daughter, "the best cicerone in the world," he said, were through the narrowest by-streets of the city, where he rejoiced in the discovery, or what he supposed to be discovery, of some neglected stone of Venice. Occasionally he examined curiously the monuments of the churches. His American friend tells at length the story of a search in the Church of San Niccolo for the tomb of the chieftain Salinguerra of Browning's own Sordello. At times he entered the bric-a-brac shops, and made a purchase of some piece of old furniture or tapestry. His rule "never to buy anything without knowing exactly what he wished to do with it" must have been interpreted liberally, for when about to move in June 1887 from Warwick Crescent to De Vere Gardens many treasures acquired in Italy were, Mrs Orr tells us, stowed away in the house which he was on the point of leaving. And the latest bibelot was always the most enchanting: "Like a child with a new toy," says Mrs Bronson, "he would carry it himself (size and weight permitting) into the gondola, rejoice over his chance in finding it, and descant eloquently upon its intrinsic merits." Thus, or with his son's assistance, came to De Vere Gardens brass lamps that had hung in Venetian chapels, the silver Jewish "Sabbath lamp," and the "four little heads"—the seasons—after which, Browning declared, he would not buy another thing for the house.[139] Returning from his walks on the Lido or wanderings through the little calli, he showed that unwise half-disdain, which an unenlightened masculine Herakles might have shown, for the blessedness of five o'clock tea. At dinner he was in his toilet what Mr Henry James calls the "member of society," never the poet whose necktie is a dithyramb. Good sense was his habit if not his foible. And why should we deny ourselves here the pleasure of imagining Miss Browning at these pleasant ceremonies, as Mrs Bronson describes her, wearing "beautiful gowns of rich and sombre tints, and appearing each day in a different and most dainty French cap and quaint antique jewels"? If other guests were not present, sometimes a visit to the theatre followed. The Venetian comedies of Gallina especially pleased Browning; he went to his spacious box at the Goldoni evening after evening, and did not fail to express his thanks to his "brother dramatist" for the enjoyment he had received. In his Toccata of Galuppi he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. When in 1883 the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a poem to their Album he immediately complied with the request. It was "scribbled off," according to Mrs Orr, while Professor Molmenti's messenger was waiting; it was ready the day after the request reached him, says Mrs Bronson, and was probably "carefully thought out before he put pen to paper." It catches, in the happiest temper, the spirit of Goldoni's sunniest plays:

There throng the People: how they come and go, Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb—see— On Piazza, Calle, under Portico And over Bridge! Dear King of Comedy, Be honoured! Thou that didst love Venice so, Venice, and we who love her, all love thee!

The brightness and lightness of southern life soothed Browning's northern strenuousness of mood. He would enumerate of a morning the crimes of "the wicked city" as revealed by the reports of the public press—a gondolier's oars had been conveyed away, a piece of linen a-dry had corrupted the virtue of some lightfingered Autolycus of the canals![140] Yet all the while much of his heart remained with his native land. He could not be happy without his London daily paper; Mrs Orr tells us how deeply interested he was in the fortunes of the British expedition for the relief of General Gordon.

In 1885 Browning's son for the first time since his childhood was in Italy. With Venice he was in his father's phrase "simply infatuated." For his son's sake, but also with the thought of a place of retreat when perhaps years should bring with them feebleness of body, Browning entered into treaty with the owner, an Austrian and an absentee, for the purchase of the Manzoni Palazzo on the Grand Canal. He considered it the most beautiful house in Venice. Ruskin had described it in the "Stones of Venice" as "a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance." It wholly captured the imagination of Browning. He not only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy opening new windows to admit the morning sunshine, and throwing out balconies, while leaving undisturbed the rich facade with its medallions in coloured marble. The dream was never realised. The vendor, Marchese Montecucculi, hoping to secure a higher price, drew back. Browning was about to force him by legal proceedings to fulfil his bargain, when it was discovered that the walls were cracked and the foundations were untrustworthy. To his great mortification the whole scheme had to be abandoned. It was not until his son in 1888, the year after his marriage, acquired possession of the Palazzo Rezzonico—"a stately temple of the rococo" is Mr Henry James's best word for it—that Browning ceased to think with regret of the lost Manzoni. At no time, however, did he design a voluntary abandonment of his life in England. When in full expectation of becoming the owner of the Palazzo Manzoni he wrote to Dr Furnivall: "Don't think I mean to give up London till it warns me away; when the hospitalities and innumerable delights grow a burden.... Pen will have sunshine and beauty about him, and every help to profit by these, while I and my sister have secured a shelter when the fogs of life grow too troublesome."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 119: Some parts of what follows on La Saisiaz have already appeared in print in a forgotten article of mine on that poem.]

[Footnote 120: "An Artist's Reminiscences," by R. Lehmann (1894), p. 231.]

[Footnote 121: Thus he declaimed to Robert Buchanan against Walt Whitman's writings, with which, according to Buchanan, he had little acquaintance.]

[Footnote 122: "Autobiography of a Journalist," ii. 210.]

[Footnote 123: From the first of three valuable articles by Mr Rossetti in The Magazine of Art (1890) on "Portraits of Robert Browning."]

[Footnote 124: Robert Browning, "Personalia," by Edmund Gosse, pp. 81, 82.]

[Footnote 125: Vol. ii. pp. 88, 89.]

[Footnote 126: Anna Swanwick, "A Memoir by Mary L. Bruce," pp. 130, 131. To Dr Furnivall he often spoke of Mrs Browning.]

[Footnote 127: From Mrs Bronson's article in The Century Magazine, "Browning in Venice."]

[Footnote 128: Related more fully in Mrs Bronson's article "Browning in Asolo" in The Century Magazine.]

[Footnote 129: Mrs Bronson's "Browning in Venice" in The Century Magazine.]

[Footnote 130: To Dr Furnivall, Sept. 28, 1884.]

[Footnote 131: Some notices of Browning in Wales occur in Sir T. Martin's "Life of Lady Martin."]

[Footnote 132: Letter to Dr Furnivall, August 29, 1881.]

[Footnote 133: To Dr Furnivall, Sept. 7, 1885.]

[Footnote 134: To Dr Furnivall, August 21, 1887.]

[Footnote 135: See for fuller details the letter in Mrs Orr's Life of Browning, pp. 407, 408.]

[Footnote 136: So described by Mrs Bronson.]

[Footnote 137: To Dr Furnivall, Oct. 11, 1881.]

[Footnote 138: Quoted by Mrs Bronson.]

[Footnote 139: Mrs Orr, "Life of Browning," p. 400.]

[Footnote 140: Mrs Bronson records this.]



Chapter XVI

Poet and Teacher in Old Age

During the last decade of his life Browning's influence as a literary power was assured. The publication indeed of The Ring and the Book in 1868 did much to establish his reputation with those readers who are not watchers for a new planet but revise their astronomical charts upon authority. He noted with satisfaction that fourteen hundred copies of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau were sold in five days, and says of Balaustion's Adventure "2500 in five months is a good sale for the likes of me." The later volumes were not perhaps more popular, but they sent readers to the earlier poems, and successive volumes of Selections made these easily accessible. That published by Moxon in 1865, and dedicated in words of admiration and friendship to Tennyson, by no means equalled in value the earlier Selections made by John Forster. The volume of 1872—dedicated also to Tennyson—which has been frequently reprinted, was arranged upon a principle, the reference of which to the poems chosen is far from clear—"by simply stringing together certain pieces"; Browning wrote, "on the thread of an imaginary personality, I present them in succession, rather as the natural development of a particular experience than because I account them the most noteworthy portion of my work." We can perceive that some poems of love are brought together, and some of art, and that the series closes with poems of religious thought or experience, but such an order is not strictly observed, and the "imaginary personality"—the thread—seems to be imaginary in the fullest sense of the word. Yet it is of interest to observe that something of a psychological-dramatic arrangement was at least designed. A second series of Selections followed in 1880. Browning was accepted by many admirers not only as a poet but as a prophet. "Tennyson and I seem now to be regarded as the two kings of Brentford," he said laughingly in 1879.[141] The later-enthroned king was soon to have an interesting court. In 1881 The Browning Society, founded by Dr Furnivall—initiator of so much work that is invaluable to the student of our literature—and Miss E.H. Hickey, herself a poet, began its course. At first, according to Mrs Orr, Browning "treated the project as a joke," but when once he understood it to be serious, "he did not oppose it." He felt, however, that before the public he must stand aloof from its work: "as Wilkes was no Wilkeite," he wrote to Edmund Yates, "I am quite other than a Browningite." With a little nervousness as to the discretion which the Society might or might not show, he felt grateful for the interest in his writings demonstrated by persons many of whom had been unknown to him even by name. He was always ready to furnish Dr Furnivall with a note of facts or elucidation. His old admirers had made him somewhat too much of a peculiar and private possession. A propaganda of younger believers could not be unwelcome to one who had for so many years been commonly regarded as an obscure heretic—not even an heresiarch—of literature.

Other honours accompanied his old age. In 1884 he received the LL.D. of the University of Edinburgh, and again declined to be nominated for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews. Next year he accepted the Honorary Presidency of the Five Associated Societies of Edinburgh. In 1886 he was appointed Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, a sinecure post rendered vacant by the death of Lord Houghton. Though so vigorous in talk, Browning could not make a public speech, or he shrank from such an effort; none of the honours which he accepted were such as to put him to this test. During many years he was President of the New Shakspere Society. His veneration for Shakespeare is expressed in a sonnet entitled The Names, written for the Book of the Show held in the Albert Hall, May 1884, on behalf of the Fulham Road Hospital for Women; it was not included in the edition of his works which he was superintending during the last two years of his life. Browning was not wholly uninterested in the attempts made to transfer the glory of the Shakespearian drama to Bacon; he agreed with Spedding that whatever else might be a matter of doubt, it was certain that the author of the "Essays" could not have been the author of the plays. On another question it is perhaps worth recording his opinion—he could see nothing of Shakespeare, he declared, in the tragedy of Titus Andronicus.

In 1879 appeared Dramatic Idyls and in the following year Dramatic Idyls, Second Series. They differed in two respects from the volumes of miscellaneous poetry which Browning had previously published. Hitherto the contents of his collections of verse in the main fell into three groups—poems which were interpretations of the passion of love, poems which dealt with art and artists, poems which were inspired by the ideas and emotions of religion. Unless we regard Ned Bratts as a poem of religious experience, we may say that these themes are wholly absent from the Dramatic Idyls. Secondly, the short story in verse for the first time becomes predominant, or rather excludes other forms, and the short story here is in general not romantic or fantastic, but what we understand by the word "realistic." The outward body of the story is in several instances more built up by cumulative details than formerly, which gives it an air of solidity or massiveness, and is less expressed through a swift selection of things essential. And this may lead a reader to suppose that the story is more a narrative of external incidents than is actually the case. In truth, though the "corporal rind" of the narrative bulks upon our view, the poet remains essentially the psychologist. The narrative interest is not evenly distributed over the whole as it is in the works of such a writer as Chaucer, who loves narrative for its own sake. There is ordinarily a crisis, a culmination, a decisive and eventful invasion or outbreak of spiritual passion to which we are led up by all that precedes it. If the poem should be humorous, it works up to some humorous point, or surprise. The narrative is in fact a picture that hangs from a nail, and the nail here is some vivid moment of spiritual experience, or else some jest which also has its crisis. A question sometimes arises as to whether the central motive is sufficient to bear the elaborate apparatus; for the parts of the poem do not always justify themselves except by reference to their centre, in the case, for example, of Doctor——, the thesis is that a bad wife is stronger than death; the jest culminates at the point where the Devil upon sight of his formidable spouse flies from the bed's-head of one who is about to die, and thus allows his victim to escape the imminent death. The question, "Will the jest sustain a poem of such length?" is a fair one, and a good-natured reader will stretch a point and say that he has not after all been so ill amused, which he might also say of an Ingoldsby Legend; but even a good-natured reader will hardly return to Doctor —— with pleasure. Chaucer with as thin a jest could have made an admirable poem, for the interest would have been distributed by his lightness of touch, by his descriptive power, by slyness, by geniality, by a changeful ripple of enjoyment over the entire piece. With Browning, when we have arrived at the apex of the jest, we are fatigued by the climb, and too much out of breath to be capable of laughter. In like manner few persons except the Browning enthusiast, who is not responsible for his fervour, will assert that either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of Pietro of Abano compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and a long. We make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the acquaintance of an astute Greek, who, at least in his dream of life, imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend Pietro, and gains the prize of his astuteness, having learnt to rule men by the potent spell of "cleverness uncurbed by conscience." The cynicism is only inverted morality, and implies that the writer is the reverse of cynical; but it lacks the attractive sub-acid flavour of a delicate cynicism, which insinuates its prophylactic virus into our veins, and the humour of the poem, ascending from stage to stage until we reach Pietro's final failure, is cumbrous and mechanical.

The two series of Dramatic Idyls included some conspicuous successes. The classical poems Pheidippides, Echetlos, Pan and Luna, idyls heroic and mythological, invite us by their beauty to return to them again and again. Browning's sympathy with gallantry in action, with self-devotion to a worthy cause, was never more vividly rendered than in the first of these poems. The runner of Athens is a more graceful brother of the Breton sailor who saved a fleet for France; but the vision of majestical Pan in "the cool of a cleft" exalts our human heroism into relation with the divine benevolence, and the reward of release from labour is proportionally higher than a holiday with the "belle Aurore." Victory and then domestic love is the human interpretation of Pan's oracular promise; but the gifts of the gods are better than our hopes and it proves to be victory and death:

He flung down his shield, Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the Fennel-field And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through, Till in he broke: "Rejoice, we conquer!" Like wine through clay, Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died—the bliss!

The companion poem of Marathon, the story of the nameless clown, the mysterious holder of the ploughshare, is not less inspiring. The unknown champion, so plain in his heroic magnitude of mind, so brilliant as he flashes in the van, in the rear, is like the incarnated genius of the soil, which hides itself in the furrow and flashes into the harvest; and it is his glory to be obscured for ever by his deed—"the great deed ne'er grows small." Browning's development of the Vergilian myth—"si credere dignum est"—of Pan and Luna astonishes by its vehement sensuousness and its frank chastity; and while the beauty of the Girl-moon and the terror of her betrayal are realised with the utmost energy of imagination, we are made to feel that all which happens is the transaction of a significant dream or legend.

In contrast with these classical pieces, Halbert and Hob reads like a fragment from some Scandinavian saga telling of the life of forlorn and monstrous creatures, cave-dwellers, who are less men than beasts. Yet father and son are indeed men; the remorse which checks the last outrage against paternity is the touch of the finger of God upon human hearts; and though old Halbert sits dead,

With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting face,

and young Hob henceforth goes tottering, muttering, mumbling with a mindless docility, they are, like Browning's men of the Paris morgue, only "apparent failures"; there was in them that spark of divine illumination which can never be wholly extinguished. Positive misdeeds, the presence of a wild crew of evil passions, do not suffice to make Browning's faith or hope falter. It is the absence of human virtue which appals him; if the salt have lost its savour wherewith shall it be salted? This it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem represents as a just, abolishment from earth the mother who in Ivan Ivanovitch has given her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved the complete nullity of her womanhood. For her there is no possible redemption; she must cease to cumber the ground. Ivan acts merely as the instinctive doomsman of Nature or of God, and the old village Pope, who, as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after the law above human law, justifies the wielder of the axe, which has been no instrument of vengeance but simply an exponent of the wholesome vitality of earth. The objection that carpenters and joiners, who assume the Heraklean task of purging the earth of monsters, must be prepared to undergo a period of confinement at the pleasure of the Czar in a Criminal Lunatic Asylum is highly sensible, and wholly inappropriate, belonging, as it does, to a plane of thought and feeling other than that in which the poem moves. But perhaps it is not a defect of feeling to fail in admiration of that admired final tableau in which the formidable carpenter is discovered building a toy Kremlin for his five children. We can take for granted that the excellent homicide, having done so simple a bit of the day's work as that of decapitating a fellow-creature, proceeds tranquilly to other innocent pleasures and duties; we do not require the ostentatious theatrical group, with limelight effects on the Kremlin and the honey-coloured beard, displayed for our benefit just before the curtain is rung down.[142]



Martin Relph is a story of life-long remorse, self-condemnation and self-denunciation; there is something approaching the supernatural, and yet terribly real, in the figure of the strange old man with a beard as white as snow, standing, on a bright May day, in monumental grief, and exposing his ulcerated heart to the spectators who form for him a kind of posterity. One instant's failure in the probation of life, one momentary syncope of his better nature long years ago, has condemned his whole after-existence to become a climbing of the purgatorial mount, with an agony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth rejoices. Only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a perennial passion of penitence. Ned Bratts may be described as a companion, but a contrasted piece. It is a story of sudden conversion and of penitence taking an immediate and highly effective form. The humour of the poem, which is excellent of its kind, resembles more the humour of Rowlandson than that of Hogarth. The Bedford Court House on the sweltering Midsummer Day, the Puritan recusants, reeking of piety and the cow-house conventicle, the Judges at high jinks upon the bench—to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of conversion, enter Black Ned, the stout publican, and big Tab, his slut of a wife,—these are drawn after the broad British style of humorous illustration, which combines a frank exaggeration of the characteristic lines with, at times, a certain grace in deformity. Here at least is downright belief in the invisible, here is genuine conviction driven home by the Spirit of God and the terror of hell-fire. Black Ned and the slut Tabby as yet may not seem the most suitable additions to the company of the blessed who move singing

In solemn troops and sweet societies;

but when a pair of lusty sinners desire nothing so much as to be hanged, and that forthwith, we may take it that they are resolved, as "Christmas" was, to quit the City of Destruction; and the saints above have learnt not to be fastidious as they bend over repentant rogues. Thanks to the grace of God and John Bunyan's book, husband and wife triumphantly aspire to and attain the gallows; "they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." A wise economy of spiritual force!—for while their effectual calling cannot be gainsaid, the final perseverance of these interesting converts, had they lingered on the pilgrims' way, as Ned is painfully aware, might have been less of a certainty.

Browning's method as a story-teller may be studied with special advantage in Clive. The circumstances under which the tale is related have to be caught at by the reader, which quickens his attention and keeps him on the alert; this device is, of course, not in itself difficult, but to employ it with success is an achievement requiring skill; it is a device proper to the dramatic or quasi-dramatic form; the speaker, who is by no means a Clive, has to betray something of his own character, and at the same time to set forth the character of the hero of his tale; the narrative must tend to a moment of culmination, a crisis; and that this should involve a paradox—Clive's fear, in the present instance, being not that the antagonist's pistol, presented at his head, should be discharged but rather that it should be remorsefully or contemptuously flung away—gives the poet an opportunity for some subtle or some passionate casuistry. The effect of the whole is that of a stream or a shock from an electric battery of mind, for which the story serves as a conductor. It is not a simple but a highly complex species of narrative. In Muleykeh, one of the most delightful of Browning's later poems, uniting, as it does, the poetry of the rapture of swift motion with the poetry of high-hearted passion, the narrative leads up to a supreme moment, and this resolves itself through a paradox of the heart. Shall Hoseyn recover his stolen Pearl of a steed, but recover her dishonoured in the race, or abandon her to the captor with her glory untarnished? It is he himself who betrays himself to loss and grief, for to perfect love, pride in the supremacy of the beloved is more than possession; and thus as Clive's fear was courage, as Ivan's violation of law was obedience to law, so Hoseyn's loss is Hoseyn's gain. In each case Browning's casuistry is not argumentative; it lies in an appeal to some passion or some intuition that is above our common levels of passion or of insight, and his power of uplifting his reader for even a moment into this higher mood is his special gift as a poet. We can return safely enough to the common ground, but we return with a possession which instructs the heart.

A mood of acquiescence, which does not displace the moods of aspiration and of combat but rather floats above them as an atmosphere, was growing familiar to Browning in these his elder years. He had sought for truth, and had now found all that earth was likely to yield him, of which not the least important part was a conviction that much of our supposed knowledge ends in a perception of our ignorance. He was now disposed to accept what seemed to be the providential order that truth and error should mingle in our earthly life, that truth should be served by illusion; he would not rearrange the disposition of things if he could. He was inclined to hold by the simple certainties of our present life and to be content with these as provisional truths, or as temporary illusions which lead on towards the truth. In the Pisgah Sights of the Pacchiarotto volume he had imagined this mood of acquiescence as belonging to the hour of death. But old age in reality is an earlier stage in the process of dying, and with all his ardour and his energy, Browning was being detached from the contentions and from some of the hopes and aspirations of life. And because he was detached he could take the world to his heart, though in a different temper from that of youth or middle age; he could limit his view to things that are near, because their claim upon his passions had diminished while their claim upon his tenderness had increased. He could smile amiably, for to the mood of acquiescence a smile seems to be worth more than an argument. He could recall the thoughts of love, and reanimate them in his imagination, and could love love with the devotion of an old man to the most precious of the things that have been. Some of an old man's jests may be found in Jocoseria, some of an old man's imaginative passion in Asolando, and in both volumes, and still more clearly in Ferishtah's Fancies may be seen an old man's spirit of acquiescence, or to use a catch-word of Matthew Arnold, the epoch of concentration which follows an epoch of expansion. But the embrace of earth and the things of earth is like the embrace, with a pathos in its ardour, which precedes a farewell. From the first he had recognised the danger on the one hand of settling down to browse contentedly in the paddock of our earthly life, and on the other hand the danger of ignoring our limitations, the danger of attempting to "thrust in earth eternity's concerns." In his earlier years he had chiefly feared the first of these two dangers, and even while pointing out, as in Paracelsus, the errors of the seeker for absolute knowledge or for absolute love, he had felt a certain sympathy with such glorious transgressors. He had valued more than any positive acquisitions of knowledge those "grasps of guess, which pull the more into the less." Now such guesses, such hopes were as precious to him as ever, but he set more store than formerly by the certainties—certainties even if illusions—of the general heart of man. These are the forms of thought and feeling divinely imposed upon us; we cannot do better than to accept them; but we must accept them only as provisional, as part of our education on earth, as a needful rung of the ladder by which we may climb to higher things. And the faith which leads to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the divine order of our lives. In autumn come for spirits rightly attuned these pellucid halcyon days of the Indian summer.

In Jocoseria, which appeared in Browning's seventy-first year (1883), he shows nothing of his boisterous humour, but smiles at our human infirmities from the heights of experience. The prop of Israel, the much-enlightened master, "Eximious Jochanan Ben Sabbathai," when his last hour is at hand has to confess that all his wisdom of life lies in his theoric; in practice he is still an infant; striving presumptuously in boyhood to live an angel, now that he comes to die he is hardly a man. And Solomon himself is no more than man; the truth-compelling ring extorts the confession that an itch of vanity still tickles and teazes him; the Queen of Sheba, seeker for wisdom and patroness of culture, after all likes wisdom best when its exponents are young men tall and proper, and prefers to the solution of the riddles of life by elderly monarchs one small kiss from a fool. Lilith in a moment of terror acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their make-believe decorums, and Adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see through what is transparent. These are harmless jests at the ironies of life. Browning's best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the series of his latest lyrical poems, begun in the exquisite prologue to La Saisiaz and the graceful epilogue to The Two Poets of Croisic, and continued in the songs of Ferishtah's Fancies and Asolando—not the least valuable part of the work of his elder years. His strength in this volume of 1883 is put into that protest of human righteousness against immoral conceptions of the Deity uttered by Ixion from his wheel of torture. Rather than obey an immoral supreme Power, as John Stuart Mill put it, "to Hell I will go"—and such is the cry of Browning's victim of Zeus. He is aware that in his recognition of righteousness he is himself superior to the evil god who afflicts him; and as this righteousness is a moral quality, and no creation of his own consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises past Zeus to the Potency above him, after which even the undeveloped sense of a Caliban blindly felt when he discovered a Quiet above the bitter god Setebos; but the Quiet of Caliban is a negation of those evil attributes of the supreme Being, which he reflects upwards from his own gross heart, not the energy of righteousness which Ixion demands in his transcendent "Potency." Into this poem went the energy of Browning's heart and imagination; some of his matured wisdom entered into Jochanan Hakkadosh, of which, however, the contents are insufficient to sustain the length. The saint and sage of Israel has at the close of his life found no solution of the riddle of existence. Lover, bard, soldier, statist, he has obtained in each of his careers only doubts and dissatisfaction. Twelve months added to a long life by the generosity of his admirers, each of whom surrenders a fragment of his own life to prolong that of the saint, bring him no clearer illumination—still all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Only at the last, when by some unexpected chance, a final opportunity of surveying the past and anticipating the future is granted him, all has become clear. Instead of trying to solve the riddle he accepts it. He sees from his Pisgah how life, with all its confusions and contrarieties, is the school which educates the soul and fits it for further wayfaring. The ultimate faith of Jochanan the Saint had been already expressed by Browning:

Over the ball of it, Peering and prying, How I see all of it, Life there, outlying! Roughness and smoothness, Shine and defilement, Grace and uncouthness: One reconcilement.

But even to his favourite disciple the sage is unable so to impart the secret that Tsaddik's mind shall really embrace it.

The spirit of the saint of Israel is also the spirit of that wise Dervish of Browning's invention (1884), the Persian Ferishtah. The volume is frankly didactic, and Browning, as becomes a master who would make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures. In reading Ferishtah's Fancies we might suppose that we were in the Interpreter's House, and that the Interpreter himself was pointing a moral with the robin that has a spider in his mouth, or the hen walking in a fourfold method towards her chickens. The discourses of the Dervish are in the main theological or philosophical; the lyrics, which are interposed between the discourses or discussions, are amatory. In Persian Poetry much that at first sight might be taken for amatory has in its inner meaning a mystical theological sense. Browning reverses the order of such poetry; he gives us first his doctrine concerning life or God, and gives it clothed in a parable; then in a lyric the subject is retracted into the sphere of human affections, and the truth of theology condenses itself into a corresponding truth respecting the love of man and woman.

Throughout the series of poems it is not a Persian Dervish who is the speaker and teacher; we hear the authentic voice of the Dervish born in Camberwell in the year 1812—Ferishtah-Browning. The doctrine set forth is the doctrine of Browning; the manner of speech is the manner of the poet. The illustrations and imagery are often Oriental; the ideas are those of a Western thinker; yet no sense of discordance is produced. The parable of the starving ravens fed by an eagle serves happily as an induction; let us become not waiters on providence, but workers with providence; and to feed hungry souls is even more needful than to feed hungry bodies:

I starve in soul: So may mankind: and since men congregate In towns, not woods—to Ispahan forthwith!

Such is the lesson of energetic charity. And the lesson for the acceptance of providential gifts is that put in words by the poor melon-seller, once the Shah's Prime Minister—words spoken in the spirit of the afflicted Job—"Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?"[143] Or rather—Shall not our hearts even in the midst of evil be lifted up in gratitude at the remembrance of the good which we have received? Browning proceeds, under a transparent veil of Oriental fable, to consider the story of the life of Christ. Do we believe in that tale of wonder in the full sense of the word belief? The more it really concerns us, the more exacting grow our demands for evidence of its truth; an otiose assent is easy, but this has none of the potency of genuine conviction. And, after all, intellectual assent is of little importance compared with that love for the Divine which may co-exist as truly with denial as with assent. The Family sets forth, through a parable, the wisdom of accepting and living in our human views of things transcendent. Why pray to God at all? Why not rather accept His will and His Providential disposition of our lives as absolutely wise, and right? That, Browning replies, may be the way of the angels. We are men, and it is God's will that we should feel and think as men:

Be man and nothing more— Man who, as man conceiving, hopes and fears, And craves and deprecates, and loves and loathes, And bids God help him, till death touch his eyes And show God granted most, denying all.

The same spirit of acceptance of our intellectual and moral limitations is applied in The Sun to the defence of anthropomorphic religion. Our spirit, burdened with the good gifts of life, looks upward for relief in gratitude and praise; but we can praise and thank only One who is righteous and loving, as we conceive righteousness and love. Let us not strive to pass beyond these human feelings and conceptions. Perhaps they are wholly remote from the unknown reality. They are none the less the conceptions proper to humanity; we have no capacities with which to correct them; let us hold fast by our human best, and preserve, as the preacher very correctly expressed it, "the integrity of our anthropomorphism." The "magnified non-natural man," and "the three Lord Shaftesburys" of Matthew Arnold's irony are regarded with no fine scorn by the intellect of Browning. His early Christian faith has expanded and taken the non-historical form of a Humanitarian Theism, courageously accepted, not as a complete account of the Unknowable, but as the best provisional conception which we are competent to form. This theism involves rather than displaces the truth shadowed forth in the life of Christ. The crudest theism would seem to him far more reasonable than to direct the religious emotions towards a "stream of tendency."

The presence of evil in a world created and governed by One all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving, is justified in Mirhab Shah as a necessity of our education. How shall love be called forth unless there be the possibility of self-sacrifice? How shall our human sympathy be perfected unless there be pain? What room is there for thanks to God or love of man if earth be the scene of such a blank monotony of well-being as may be found in the star Rephan? But let us not call evil good, or think pain in itself a gain. God may see that evil is null, and that pain is gain; for us the human view, the human feeling must suffice. This justification of pain as a needful part of an education is, however, inapplicable to never-ending retributive punishment. Such a theological horror Browning rejects with a hearty indignation, qualified only by a humorous contempt, in his apologue of A Camel-driver; her driver, if the camel bites, will with good cause thwack, and so instruct the brute that mouths should munch not bite; he will not, six months afterwards, thrust red-hot prongs into the soft of her flesh to hiss there. And God has the advantage over the driver of seeing into the camel's brain and of knowing precisely what moved the creature to offend. The poem which follows is directed against asceticism. Self-sacrifice for the sake of our fellows is indeed "joy beyond joy." As to the rest—the question is not whether we fast or feast, but whether, fasting or feasting, we do our day's work for the Master. If we would supply joy to our fellows, it is needful that we should first know joy ourselves—

Therefore, desire joy and thank God for it!

Browning's argument is not profound, and could adroitly be turned against himself; but his temperament would survive his argument; his capacity for manifold pleasures was great, and he not only valued these as good in themselves, but turned them to admirable uses. A feast of the senses was to him as spiritually precious as a fast might be to one who only by fasting could attain to higher joys than those of sense. And this, he would maintain, is a better condition for a human being than that which renders expedient the plucking out of an eye, the cutting off of a hand. Joy for Browning means praise and gratitude; and in recognising the occasions for such praise and thanks let us not wind ourselves too high. Let us praise God for the little things that are so considerately fitted to our little human wants and desires. The morning-stars will sing together without our help; if we must choose our moment for a Te Deum, let it be when we have enjoyed our plate of cherries. The glorious lamp in the Shah's pavilion lightens other eyes than mine; but to think that the Shah's goodness has provided slippers for my feet in my own small chamber, and of the very colour that I most affect! Nor, in returning thanks, should it cause us trouble that our best thanks are poor, or even that they are mingled with an alloy of earthly regards, "mere man's motives—"

Alas, Friend, what was free from this alloy,— Some smatch thereof,—in best and purest love Preferred thy earthly father? Dust thou art, Dust shall be to the end.

Our little human pleasures—do they seem unworthy to meet the eye of God? That is a question put by distrust and spiritual pride. God gives each of us His little plot, within which each of us is master. The question is not what compost, what manure, makes fruitful the soil; we need not report to the Lord of the soil the history of our manures; let us treat the ground as seems best, if only we bring sacks to His granary in autumn. Nay, do not I also tickle the palate of my ass with a thistle-bunch, so heartening him to do his work?

In A Pillar at Sebzevah, Ferishtah-Browning confronts the objection that he has deposed knowledge and degraded humanity to the rank of an ass whose highest attainment is to love—what? "Husked lupines, and belike the feeder's self." The Dervish declares without shrinking the faith that is in him:—

"Friend," quoth Ferishtah, "all I seem to know Is—I know nothing save that love I can Boundlessly, endlessly."



If there be knowledge it shall vanish away; but charity never faileth. As for knowledge, the prize is in the process; as gain we must mistrust it, not as a road to gain:—

Knowledge means Ever-renewed assurance by defeat That victory is somehow still to reach, But love is victory, the prize itself.

Grasping at the sun, a child captures an orange: what if he were to scorn his capture and refuse to suck its juice? The curse of life is this—that every supposed accession to knowledge, every novel theory, is accepted as a complete solution of the whole problem, while every pleasure is despised as transitory or insubstantial. In truth the drop of water found in the desert sand is infinitely precious; the mirage is only a mirage. Browning, who in this volume puts forth his own doctrine of theism, his justification of prayer, his belief in a superintending providence, his explanation of the presence of evil in the world, is, of course, no Pyrrhonist. He profoundly distrusts the capacity of the intellect, acting as a pure organ of speculation, to unriddle the mysteries of existence; he maintains, on the other hand, that knowledge sufficient for the conduct of our lives is involved in the simple experiences of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. In reality Browning's attitude towards truth approaches more nearly what has now begun to style itself "Pragmatism" than it approaches Pyrrhonism; but philosophers whose joy is to beat the air may find that it is condemnatory of their methods.

In his distrust of metaphysical speculation and in regarding the affections as superior to the intellect, Browning as a teacher has something in common with Comte; but there is perhaps no creed so alien to his nature as the creed of Positivism. The last of Ferishtah's discourses is concerned with the proportion which happiness bears to pain in the average life of man, or rather—for Browning is nothing if he is not individualistic—in the life of each man as an individual. The conclusion arrived at is that no "bean-stripe"—each bean, white or black, standing for a day—is wholly black, and that the more extended is our field of vision the more is the general aspect of the "bean-stripe" of a colour intermediate between the extremes of darkness and of light. Before the poem closes, Browning turns aside to consider the Positivist position. Why give our thanks and praise for all the good things of life to God, whose existence is an inference of the heart derived from its own need of rendering gratitude to some Being like ourselves? Are not these good things the gifts of the race, of Humanity, and its worthies who have preceded us and who at the present moment constitute our environment of loving help? Ferishtah's reply, which is far from conclusive, must be regarded as no discussion of the subject but the utterance of an isolated thought. Praise rendered to Humanity and the heroes of the race simply reverts to the giver of the praise; his own perceptions of what is praiseworthy alone render praise possible; he must first of all thank and praise the giver of such perceptions—God. It is strange that Browning should fail to recognise the fact that the Positivist would immediately trace the power of moral perception to the energies of Humanity in its upward progress from primitive savagery to our present state of imperfect development.

It has been necessary to transcribe in a reduced form the teaching of Ferishtah, for this is the clearest record left by Browning of his own beliefs on the most important of all subjects, this is an essential part of his criticism of life, and at the same time it is little less than a passage of autobiography. The poems are admirable in their vigour, their humour, their seriousness, their felicity of imagery. Yet the wisdom of Ferishtah's Fancies is an old man's wisdom; we perceive in it the inner life, as Baxter puts it, in speaking of changes wrought by his elder years, quitting the leaves and branches and drawing down to the root. But when in prologue or epilogue to this volume or that Browning touches upon the great happiness, the great sorrow of his own life, he is always young. Here the lyrical epilogue is inspired by a noble enthusiasm, and closes with a surprise of beauty. What if all his happy faith in the purpose of life, and the Divine presence through all its course, were but a reflex from the private and personal love that had once been his and was still above and around him? Such a doubt contained its own refutation:

Only, at heart's utmost joy and triumph, terror Sudden turns the blood to ice: a chill wind disencharms All the late enchantment! What if all be error— If the halo irised round my head were, Love, thine arms?

All the more, if this were so, must the speaker's heart turn Godwards in gratitude. The whole design of the volume with its theological parables and its beautiful lyrics of human love implies that there is a correspondency between the truths of religion and the truths of the passion of love between man and woman.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 141: Mr Gosse: "Dictionary of National Biography," Supplement, i. 317.]

[Footnote 142: Of the mother in this poem, a writer in the "Browning Society's Papers," Miss E.D. West, said justly: "There is discernible in her no soul which could be cleansed from guilt by any purgatorial process.... Her fault had not been moral, had not been sin, to be punished by pain inflicted on the soul; it was merely the uncounteracted primary instinct of self-preservation, and as such it is fitliest dealt with by the simple depriving her, without further penalty, of the very life which she had secured for herself at so horrible a cost."]

[Footnote 143: The story of the melon-seller was related by a correspondent of The Times in 1846, and is told by Browning in a letter to Miss Barrett of Aug. 6 of that year. Thus subjects of verse rose up in his memory after many years.]



Chapter XVII

Closing Works and Days

Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, published in 1887, Browning's last volume but one, betrays not the slightest decline in his mental vigour. It suffers, however, from the fact that several of the "Parleyings" are discussions—emotional, it is true, as well as intellectual—of somewhat abstract themes, that these discussions are often prolonged beyond what the subject requires, and that the "People of Importance" are in some instances not men and women, but mere sounding-boards to throw out Browning's own voice. When certain aspects or principles of art are considered in Fra Lippo Lippi, before us stands Brother Lippo himself, a living, breathing figure, on whom our interest must needs fasten whatever may be the subject of his discourse. There is of course a propriety in connecting a debate on evil in the world as a means to good with the name of the author of "The Fable of the Bees," there is no impropriety in connecting a study of the philosophy of music with the name of Charles Avison the Newcastle organist; but we do not make acquaintance through the parleyings with either Avison or Mandeville. This objection does not apply to all the poems. The parleying With Daniel Bartoli is a story of love and loss, admirable in its presentation of the heroine and the unheroic hero. We are interested in Francis Furini, "good priest, good man, good painter," before he begins to preach his somewhat portentous sermon on evolution. And in the case of Christopher Smart, the question why once and only once he was a divinely inspired singer is the question which most directly leads to a disclosure of his character as a poet. The volume, however, as a whole, while Browning's energy never flags, has a larger proportion than its predecessors of what he himself terms "mere grey argument"; and, as if to compensate this, it is remarkable for sudden outbursts of imagination and passion, as if these repressed for a time had carried away the dykes and dams, and went on their career in full flood. The description of the glory of sunrise in Bernard de Mandeville, the description of the Chapel in Christopher Smart, the praise of a woman's beauty in Francis Furini, the amazing succession of mythological tours de force in Gerard de Lairesse, the delightful picture of the blackcap tugging at his prize, a scrap of rag on the garden wall, amid the falling snow of March, in the opening of Charles Avison—these are sufficient evidence of the abounding force of Browning's genius as a poet at a date when he had passed the three score years and ten by half an added decade. Nor would we willingly forget that magical lyric of life and death, of the tulip beds and the daisied grave-mound—"Dance, yellows and whites and reds"—which closes Gerard de Lairesse. Wordsworth's daffodils are hardly a more jocund company than Browning's wind-tossed tulips; he accepts their gladness, and yet the starved grass and daisies are more to him than these:

Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows: Dance you, reds and whites and yellows!

Of failure in intellectual or imaginative force the Parleyings show no symptom. But the vigour of Browning's will did a certain wrong to his other powers. He did not wait, as in early days, for the genuine casual inspirations of pleasure. He made it his task to work out all that was in him. And what comes to a writer of genius is better than what is laboriously sought. We may gather wood for the altar, but the true fire must descend from heaven. The speed and excitement kindled by one's own exertions are very different from the varying stress of a wind that bears one onward without the thump and rattle of the engine-room. It would have been a gain if Browning's indomitable steam-engines had occasionally ceased to ply, and he had been compelled to wait for a propitious breeze.

Philosophy, Love, Poetry, Politics, Painting (the nude, with a discourse concerning evolution), Painting again (the modern versus the mythological in art), Music, and, if we add the epilogue, the Invention of Printing—these are the successive themes of Browning's Parleyings, and they are important and interesting themes. Unfortunately the method of discussion is neither sufficiently abstract for the lucid exposition of ideas, nor sufficiently concrete for the pure communication of poetic pleasure. Abstract and concrete meet and take hands or jostle, too much as skeleton and lady might in a danse Macabre. The spirit of acquiescence—strenuous not indolent acquiescence—with our intellectual limitations is constantly present. Does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun? Well, did not Prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service? Is the fire a little thing beside the immensity in the heavens above us?

Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed— Which, in the large, who sees to bless?

Or again—it is Christopher Smart, who triumphs for once so magnificently in his "Song to David," and fails, with all his contemporaries, in the poetry of ambitious instruction. And why? Because for once he was content with the first step that poetry should take—to confer enjoyment, leaving instruction—the fruit of enjoyment—to come later. True learning teaches through love and delight, not through pretentious didactics,—a truth forgotten by the whole tribe of eighteenth century versifiers. And once more—does Francis Furini paint the naked body in all its beauty? Right! let him study precisely this divine thing the body, before he looks upward; let him retire from the infinite into his proper circumscription:

Only by looking low, ere looking high, Comes penetration of the mystery.

So also with our view of the mingled good and evil in the world; perhaps to some transcendent vision evil may wholly disappear; perhaps we shall ourselves make this discovery as we look back upon the life on earth. Meanwhile it is as men that we must see things, and even if evil be an illusion (as Browning trusts), it is a needful illusion in our educational process, since through evil we become aware of good. Thus at every point Browning accepts here, as in Ferishtah's Fancies, a limited provisional knowledge as sufficient for our present needs, with a sustaining hope which extends into the future. On the other hand, if your affair is not the sincerity of thought and feeling, but a design to rule the mass of men for your own advantage, you must act in a different spirit. Do not, in the manner of Bubb Doddington, attempt to impose upon your fellows with the obvious and worn-out pretence that all you do has been undertaken on their behalf and in their interests. There is a newer and a better trick than that. Assume the supernatural; have a "mission "; have a "message"; be earnest, with all the authority of a divine purpose. Play boldly this new card of statesmanship, and you may have from time to time as many inconsistent missions and messages as ambitious statecraft can suggest to you. Through all your gyrations the admiring crowd will still stand agape. Was Browning's irony of a cynical philosophy of statesmanship suggested by his view of the procedure of a politician, whom he had once admired, whose talents he still recognised, but from whom he now turned away with indignant aversion? However this may have been, his poems which touch on politics do not imply that respect for the people thinking, feeling, and moving, in masses which is a common profession with the liberal leaders of the platform. Browning's liberalism was a form of his individualism; he, like Shakespeare, had a sympathy with the wants and affections of the humblest human lives; and, like Shakespeare, he thought that foolish or incompetent heads are often conjoined with hearts that in a high degree deserve respect.

Asolando, the last volume of a long array, was published in London on the last day of Browning's life. As he lay dying in Venice, telegraphed tidings reached his son of the eager demand for copies made in anticipation of its appearance and of the instant and appreciative reviews; Browning heard the report with a quiet gratification. It is happy when praise in departing is justified, and this was the case with a collection of poems which to some readers seemed like a revival of the poetry of its author's best years of early and mid manhood. Asolando is, however, in the main distinctly an autumn gathering, a handful of flowers and fruit belonging to the Indian summer of his genius. The Prologue is a confession, like that of Wordsworth's great Ode, that a glory has passed away from the earth. When first he set eyes on Asolo, some fifty years previously, the splendour of Italian landscape seemed that of

Terror with beauty, like the Bush Burning yet unconsumed

Now, while the beauty remains, the flame is extinct—"the Bush is bare." Browning finds his consolation in the belief that he has come nearer to the realities of earth by discarding fancies, and that his wonder and awe are more wisely directed towards the transcendent God than towards His creatures. But in truth what the mind confers is a fact and no fancy; the loss of what Browning calls the "soul's iris-bow" is the loss of a substantial, a divine possession. The Epilogue has in it a certain energy, but the thews are those of an old athlete, and through the energy we are conscious of the strain. The speaker pitches his voice high, as if it could not otherwise be heard at a distance. The Reverie, a speculation on the time when Power will show itself fully and therefore be known as love, has some of that vigorous intellectual garrulity which had grown on Browning during the years when unhappily for his poetry he came to be regarded chiefly as a prophet and a sage. An old man rightly values the truths which experience has made real for him; he repeats them again and again, for they constitute the best gift he can offer to his disciples; but his utterances are not always directly inspired; they are sometimes faintly echoed from an earlier inspiration. In the Reverie, while accepting our limitations of knowledge, which he can term ignorance in its contrast with the vast unknown, Browning discovers in the moral consciousness of man a prophecy of the ultimate triumph of good over what we think of as evil, a prophecy of the final reconciliation of love with power. And among the laws of life is not merely submission but aspiration:

Life is—to wake not sleep, Rise and not rest, but press From earth's level where blindly creep Things perfected, more or less, To the heaven's height, far and steep, Where amid what strifes and storms May wait the adventurous quest, Power is love.

The voice of the poet of Paracelsus and of Rabbi Ben Ezra is still audible in this latest of his prophesyings. And therefore he welcomes earth in his Rephan, earth, with its whole array of failures and despairs, as the fit training-ground for man. Better its trials and losses and crosses than a sterile uniformity of happiness; better its strife than rest in any golden mean of excellence. Nor are its intellectual errors and illusions without their educational value. It is better, as Development, with its recollections of Browning's childhood, assures us that the boy should believe in Troy siege, and the combats of Hector and Achilles, as veritable facts of history, than bend his brow over Wolfs Prolegomena or perplex his brain with moral philosophies to grapple with which his mind is not yet competent. By and by his illusions will disappear while their gains will remain.

The general impression left by Asolando is that of intellectual and imaginative vigour. The series of Bad Dreams is very striking and original in both pictorial and passionate power. Dubiety is a poem of the Indian Summer, but it has the beauty, with a touch of the pathos, proper to the time. The love songs are rather songs of praise than of passion, but they are beautiful songs of praise, and that entitled Speculative, which is frankly a poem of old age, has in it the genuine passion of memory. White Witchcraft does in truth revive the manner of earlier volumes. The

Infinite passion and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn

told of in a poem of 1855 is present, with a touch of humour to guard it from its own excess in the admirable Inapprehensiveness. The speaker who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he gallantly accepts his humble role in the tragi-comedy of foiled passion:—

"No, the book Which noticed how the wall-growths wave," said she, "Was not by Ruskin." I said "Vernon Lee."

And in the uttered "Vernon Lee" lies a vast renunciation half comical and wholly tragic. There are jests in the volume, and these, with the exception of Ponte dell' Angelo, have the merit of brevity; they buzz swiftly in and out, and do not wind about us with the terror of voluminous coils, as sometimes happens when Browning is in his mood of mirth. There are stories, and they are told with spirit and with skill. In Beatrice Signorini the story-teller does justice to the honest jealousy of a wife and to the honest love of a husband who returns from the wanderings of his imagination to the frank fidelity of his heart. Cynicism grows genial in the jest of The Pope and the Net. In Muckle-Mouth Meg, laughter and kisses, audible from the page, and a woman's art in love-craft, turn tragedy in a hearty piece of comedy. The Bean-Feast presents us with the latest transformation of the Herakles ideal, where a good Christian Herakles, Pope Sixtus of Rome, makes common cause with his spiritual children in their humble pleasures of the senses. And in contrast with this poem of the religion of joy is the story of another ruler of Rome, the too fortunate Emperor Augustus, who, in the shadow of the religion of fear and sorrow, must propitiate the envy of Fate by turning beggar once a year. A shivering thrill runs through us as we catch a sight of the supreme mendicant's "sparkling eyes beneath their eyebrows' ridge":

"He's God!" shouts Lucius Varus Rufus: "Man And worms'-meat any moment!" mutters low Some Power, admonishing the mortal-born.

There were nobler sides of Paganism than this with which Browning seems never to have had an adequate sympathy. And yet the religion even of Marcus Aurelius lacked something of the joy of the religion of the thankful Pope who feasted upon beans.[144]

In the winter which followed his change of abode from Warwick Crescent to the more commodious house in De Vere Gardens, the winter of 1887-1888, Browning's health and strength visibly declined; a succession of exhausting colds lowered his vitality; yet he maintained his habitual ways of life, and would not yield. In August 1888 he started ill for his Italian holiday, and travelled with difficulty and distress. But the rest among the mountains at Primiero restored him. At Venice he seemed as vigorous as he was joyous. And when he returned to London in February 1889 the improvement in his strength was in a considerable measure maintained. Yet it was evident that the physical vigour which had seemed invincible was on the ebb. In the early summer he paid the last of those visits, which he so highly valued, to Balliol College, Oxford. The opening week of June found him at Cambridge. Mr Gosse has told how on the first Sunday of that month Browning and he sat together "in a sequestered part of the beautiful Fellows' Garden of Trinity," under a cloudless sky, amid the early foliage with double hawthorns in bloom, and how the old man, in a mood of serenity and without his usual gesticulation, talked of his own early life and aspirations. He shrank that summer, says Mrs Orr, from the fatigue of a journey to Italy and thought of Scotland as a place of rest. But unfavourable weather in early August forbade the execution of the plan. An invitation from Mrs Bronson to her house at Asolo, to be followed by the pleasure of seeing his son and his son's wife in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, were attractions not to be resisted, and in company with Miss Browning, he reached the little hill-town that had grown so dear to him without mishap and even without fatigue.

To the early days of July, shortly before his departure for Italy, belong two incidents which may be placed side by side as exhibiting two contrasted sides of Browning's character. On the 5th of that month he dined with the Shah, who begged for the gift of one of his books. Next day he chose a volume the binding of which might, as he says, "take the imperial eye"; but the pleasure of the day was another gift, a gift to a person who was not imperial. "I said to myself," he wrote to his young friend the painter Lehmann's daughter, addressed in the letter as "My beloved Alma"—"I said to myself 'Here do I present my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author's sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?' So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or not, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend, Robert Browning." A gracious bowing of old age over the grace and charm of youth! But the work of two days later, July 8th, was not gracious. The lines "To Edward Fitzgerald," printed in The Athenaeum, were dated on that day. It is stated by Mrs Orr that when they were despatched to the journal in which they appeared, Browning regretted the deed, though afterwards he found reasons to justify himself. Fitzgerald's reference to Mrs Browning caused him a spasm of pain and indignation, nor did the pain for long subside. The expression of his indignation was outrageous in manner, and deficient in real power. He had read a worse meaning into the unhappy words than had been intended, and the writer was dead. Browning's act was like an involuntary muscular contraction, which he could not control. The lines sprang far more from love than from hate. "I felt as if she had died yesterday," he said. We cannot regret that Browning was capable of such an offence; we can only regret that what should have controlled his cry of pain and rage did not operate at the right moment.

In Asolo, beside "the gate," Mrs Bronson had found and partly made what Mr Henry James describes as "one of the quaintest possible little places of villegiatura"—La Mura, the house, "resting half upon the dismantled, dissimulated town-wall. No sweeter spot in all the sweetnesses of Italy." Browning's last visit to Asolo was a time of almost unmingled enjoyment. "He seemed possessed," writes Mrs Orr, "by a strange buoyancy, an almost feverish joy in life." The thought that he was in Asolo again, which he had first seen in his twenty-sixth year, and since then had never ceased to remember with affection, was a happy wonder to him. He would stand delighted on the loggia of La Mura, looking out over the plain and identifying the places of historical interest, some of which were connected with his own "Sordello." Nor was the later story forgotten of Queen Caterina Cornaro, whose palace-tower overlooks Asolo, and whose secretary, Cardinal Bembo, wrote gli Asolani, from which came the suggestion for the title of Browning's forthcoming volume. At times, as Mrs Bronson relates, the beauty of the prospect was enough, with no historical reminiscences, the plain with its moving shadows, the mountain-ranges to the west, and southwards the delicate outline of the Euganean Hills. "I was right," said he, "to fall in love with this place fifty years ago, was I not?"

The procedure of the day at Asolo was almost as regular as that of a London day. The morning walk with his sister, when everything that was notable was noted by his keen eyes, the return, English newspapers, proof-sheets, correspondence, the light mid-day meal, the afternoon drive in Mrs Branson's carriage, tea upon the loggia, the evening with music or reading, or visits to the little theatre—these constituted an almost unvarying and happy routine. On his walks he delighted to recognise little details of architecture which he had observed in former years; or he would peer into the hedgerows and watch the living creatures that lurked there, or would "whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them."[145] Sometimes a longer drive (and that to Bassano was his favourite) required an earlier start in the carriage with luncheon at some little inn. "If we were ever late in returning to Asolo," Mrs Bronson writes, "he would say 'Tell Vittorio to drive quickly; we must not lose the sunset from the loggia.' ... Often after a storm, the effects of sun breaking through clouds before its setting, combined with the scenery of plain and mountain, were such as to rouse the poet to the greatest enthusiasm. Heedless of cold or damp, forgetting himself completely, though warmly wrapped to please others, he would gaze on the changing aspects of earth and sky until darkness covered everything from his sight."

When in the evenings Browning read aloud he did not, like Tennyson, as described by Mr Rossetti, allow his voice to "sway onward with a long-drawn chaunt" which gave "noble value and emphasis to the metrical structure and pauses." His delivery was full and distinctive, but it "took much less account than Tennyson's of the poem as a rhythmical whole; his delivery had more affinity to that of an actor, laying stress on all the light and shade of the composition—its touches of character, the conversational points, its dramatic give-and-take. In those qualities of elocution in which Tennyson was strong, and aimed to be strong, Browning was contentedly weak; and vice versa."[146] Sometimes, like another great poet, Pope, he was deeply affected by the passion of beauty or heroism or pathos in what he read, and could not control his feelings. Mrs Orr mentions that in reading aloud his translation of the Herakles, he, like Pope in reading a passage of his Iliad, was moved to tears. Dr Furnivall tells of the mounting excitement with which he once delivered in the writer's hearing his Ixion. When at La Mura after his dreamy playing, on a spinet of 1522, old airs, melodious, melancholy airs, Browning would propose to read aloud, it was not his own poetry that he most willingly chose. "No R.B. to-night," he would say; "then with a smile, 'Let us have some real poetry'"; and the volume would be one by Shelley or Keats, or Coleridge or Tennyson. It was as a punishment to his hostess for the crime of having no Shakespeare on her shelves that he threatened her with one of his "toughest poems"; but the tough poem, interpreted by his emphasis and pauses, became "as clear and comprehensible as one could possibly desire." In his talk at Asolo "he seemed purposely to avoid deep and serious topics. If such were broached in his presence he dismissed them with one strong, convincing sentence, and adroitly turned the current of conversation into a shallower channel."

A project which came very near his heart was that of purchasing from the municipal authorities a small piece of ground, divided from La Mura by a ravine clothed with olive and other trees, "on which stood an unfinished building"—the words are Mrs Bronson's—"commanding the finest view in Asolo." He desired much to have a summer or autumn abode to which he might turn with the assurance of rest in what most pleased and suited him. In imagination, with his characteristic eagerness, he had already altered and added to the existing structure, and decided on the size and aspect of the loggia which was to out-rival that of La Mura. "'It shall have a tower,' he said, 'whence I can see Venice at every hour of the day, and I shall call it "Pippa's Tower".... We will throw a rustic bridge across the streamlet in the ravine.'" And then, in a graver mood: "It may not be for me to enjoy it long—who can say? But it will be useful for Pen and his family.... But I am good for ten years yet." And when his son visited Asolo and approved of the project of Pippa's Tower, Browning's happiness in his dream was complete. It was on the night of his death that the authorities of Asolo decided that the purchase might be carried into effect.



For a time during this last visit to Asolo Browning suffered some inconvenience from shortness of breath in climbing hills, but the discomfort passed away. He looked forward to an early return to England, spoke with pleasant anticipation of the soft-pedal piano which his kind friend Mrs Bronson desired to procure at Boston and place in his study in De Vere Gardens, and he dreamed of future poetical achievements. "Shall I whisper to you my ambition and my hope?" he asked his hostess. "It is to write a tragedy better than anything I have done yet. I think of it constantly." With the end of October the happy days at Asolo were at an end. On the first of November he was in Venice, "magnificently lodged," he says, "in this vast palazzo, which my son has really shown himself fit to possess, so surprising are his restorations and improvements." At Asolo he had parted from his American friend Story with the words, "More than forty years of friendship and never a break." In Venice he met an American friend of more recent years, Professor Corson, who describes him as stepping briskly, with a look that went everywhere, and as cheerfully anticipating many more years of productive work.[147] Yet in truth the end was near. Dining with Mr and Mrs Curtis, where he read aloud some poems of his forthcoming volume, he met a London physician, Dr Bird. Next evening Dr Bird again dined with Browning, who expressed confident satisfaction as to his state of health, and held out his wrist that his words might be confirmed by the regularity and vigour of his pulse. The physician became at once aware that Browning's confidence was far from receiving the warrant in which he believed. Still he maintained his customary two hours' walk each day. Towards the close of November, on a day of fog, he returned from the Lido with symptoms of a bronchial cold. He dealt with the trouble as he was accustomed, and did not take to his bed. Though feeling scarcely fit to travel he planned his departure for England after the lapse of four or five days. On December 1st, an Italian physician was summoned, and immediately perceived the gravity of the case. Within a few days the bronchial trouble was subdued, but failure of the heart was apparent. Some hours before the end he said to one of his nurses, "I feel much worse. I know now that I must die." The ebbing away of life was painless. As the clocks of Venice were striking ten on the night of Thursday, December 12, 1889, Browning died.[148]

He had never concerned himself much about his place of burial. A lifeless body seemed to him only an old vesture that had been cast aside. "He had said to his sister in the foregoing summer," Mrs Orr tells us, "that he wished to be buried wherever he might die; if in England, with his mother; if in France, with his father; if in Italy, with his wife." The English cemetery in Florence had, however, been closed. The choice seemed to lie between Venice, which was the desire of the city, or, if the difficulties could be overcome by the intervention of Lord Dufferin, the old Florentine cemetery. The matter was decided otherwise; a grave in Westminster Abbey was proposed by Dean Bradley, and the proposal was accepted.[149] A private service took place in the Palazzo Rezzonico; the coffin, in compliance with the civic requirements, was conveyed with public honours to the chapel on the island of San Michele; and from thence to the house in De Vere Gardens. On the last day of the year 1889, in presence of a great and reverent crowd, with solemn music arranged for the words of Mrs Browning's poem, "He giveth his beloved sleep," the body of Browning was laid in its resting-place in Poets' Corner.

To attempt at the present time to determine the place of Browning in the history of English poetry is perhaps premature. Yet the record of "How it strikes a contemporary" may itself have a certain historical interest. When estimates of this kind have been revised by time even their errors are sometimes instructive, or, if not instructive, are amusing. It is probable that Tennyson will remain as the chief representative in poetry of the Victorian period. Browning, who was slower in securing an audience, may be found to possess a more independent individuality. Yet in truth no great writer is independent of the influences of his age.

Browning as a poet had his origins in the romantic school of English poetry; but he came at a time when the romance of external action and adventure had exhausted itself, and when it became necessary to carry romance into the inner world where the adventures are those of the soul. On the ethical and religious side he sprang from English Puritanism. Each of these influences was modified by his own genius and by the circumstances of its development. His keen observation of facts and passionate inquisition of human character drew him in the direction of what is termed realism. This combination of realism with romance is even more strikingly seen in an elder contemporary on whose work Browning bestowed an ardent admiration, the novelist Balzac. His Puritanism received important modifications from his wide-ranging artistic instincts and sympathies, and again from the liberality of a wide-ranging intellect. He has the strenuous moral force of Puritanism, but he is wholly free from asceticism, except in the higher significance of that word—the hardy discipline of an athlete. Opinions count for less than the form and the habitual attitudes of a soul. These with Browning were always essentially Christian. He regarded our life on earth as a state of probation and of preparation; sometimes as a battle-field in which our test lies in the choice of the worse or the better side and the energy of devotion to the cause; sometimes as a school of education, in the processes of which the emotions play a larger part than the intellect. The degrees in that school are not to be taken on earth. And on the battle-field the final issue is not to be determined here, so that what appears as defeat may contain within it an assured promise of ultimate victory. The attitudes of the spirit which were most habitual with him were two—the attitude of aspiration and the attitude of submission. These he brought into harmony with each other by his conception of human life as a period of training for a higher life; we must make the most vigorous and joyous use of our schooling, and yet we must press towards what lies beyond it.

From the romantic poetry of the early years of the nineteenth century comes a cry or a sigh of limitless desire. Under the inspiration of the Revolutionary movement passion had broken the bounds of the eighteenth century ideal of balance and moderation. With the transcendental reaction against a mechanical view of the relation of God to the universe and to humanity the soul had put forth boundless claims and unmeasured aspirations. In his poetic method each writer followed the leadings of his own genius, without reference to common rules and standards; the individualism of the Revolutionary epoch asserted itself to the full. These several influences helped to determine the character of Browning's poetry. But meeting in him the ethical and religious tendencies of English Puritanism they acquired new significances and assumed new forms. The cry of desire could not turn, as it did with Byron, to cynicism; it must not waste itself, as sometimes happened with Shelley, in the air or the ether. It must be controlled by the will and turned to some spiritual uses. The transcendental feeling which Wordsworth most often attained through an impassioned contemplation of external nature must rest upon a broader basis and include among its sources or abettors all the higher passions of humanity. The Revolutionary individualism must be maintained and extended; in his methods Browning would acknowledge no master; he would please himself and compel his readers to accept his method even if strange or singular. As for the mediaeval revival, which tried to turn aside, and in part capture, the transcendental tendencies of his time, Browning rejected it, in the old temper of English Puritanism, on the side of religion; but on the side of art it opened certain avenues upon which he eagerly entered. The scientific movement of the nineteenth century influenced him partly as a force to be met and opposed by his militant transcendentalism. Yet he gives definite expression in Paracelsus to an idea of evolution both in nature and in human society, an idea of evolution which is, however, essentially theistic. "All that seems proved in Darwin's scheme," he wrote to Dr Furnivall in 1881, "was a conception familiar to me from the beginning." The positive influences of the scientific age in which he lived upon Browning's work were chiefly these—first it tended to intellectualise his instincts, compelling him to justify them by a definite theory; and secondly it co-operated with his tendency towards realism as a student of the facts of human nature; it urged him towards research in his psychology of the passions; it supported him in his curious inquisition of the phenomena of the world of mind.