Another excuse may be made for his faults of style. It may be said that in one sense the faults are excellences. When a poet has to represent excessively subtle phases of thought and feeling, with a crowd of side-thoughts and side-feelings intruding on them; when he has to describe the excessive oddities, the curious turns of human emotion in strange inward conditions or outward circumstances or when he has to deal with rugged or even savage characters under the sway of the passions; he cannot, we are told, do it otherwise than Browning did it, and, instead of being lazy, he used these quips and cranks of style deliberately.

The excuse has something in it. But, all the same, an artist should have managed it otherwise. Shakespeare was far more subtle in thought than Browning, and he had to deal with every kind of strange circumstance and characters; but his composition and his style illuminate the characters, order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for example, in the Sonnets, the subtleties of his thought. A great artist, by his comprehensive grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a short lyric or a small picture, and by his luminous representation of it, suggests, without direct expression of them, all the strange psychology, and the play of character in the situations. And such an artist does this excellent thing by his noble composition, and by his lofty, clear, and melodious style. The excuse is, then, of some weight, but it does not relieve Browning of the charge. Had he been a greater artist, he would have been a greater master of the right way of saying things and a greater pleasurer of the future. Had he taken more pains with his style, but without losing its individual elements, he might have had as high a poetic place as Tennyson in the judgment of posterity.

(3) In one thing more—in this matter of form—the beauty of poetry lies. It is in sweetness of melody and its charm; in exquisite fitness of its music to its thought and its emotion; in lawful change of harmony making enchanting variety to the ear; in the obedience of the melodies to the laws of the different kinds of poetry; and in the lovely conduct of the harmonies, through all their changes, to that finished close which throws back its own beauty on all that has preceded it. This part of the loveliness of form in poetry, along with composition and style—for without these and without noble matter of thought poetry is nothing but pleasant noise—secures also the continuous delight of men and the approving judgment of the future; and in this also Tennyson, who gave to it the steady work of a lifetime, stands above his brother-poet. Browning was far too careless of his melody. He frequently sacrificed it, and needlessly, to his thought. He may have imagined that he strengthened the thing he thought by breaking the melody. He did not, he injured it. He injured the melody also by casting into the middle of it, like stones into a clear water, rough parenthetic sounds to suit his parenthetic phrases. He breaks it sometimes into two with violent clanging words, with discords which he does not resolve, but forgets. And in the pleasure he took in quaint oddities of sound, in jarring tricks with his metre, in fantastic and difficult arrangements of rhyme, in scientific displays of double rhymes, he, only too often, immolates melody on the altar of his own cleverness.

A great many of the poems in which the natural loveliness of melody is thus sacrificed or maimed will last, on account of the closely-woven work of the intellect in them, and on account of their vivid presentation of the travail of the soul; that is, they will last for qualities which might belong to prose; but they will not last as poetry. And other poems, in which the melody is only interrupted here and there, will lose a great deal of the continuity of pleasure they would have given to man had they been more careful to obey those laws of fine melody which Tennyson never disobeys.

It is fortunate that neither of these injuries can be attributed to the whole of his work; and I am equally far from saying that his faults of style and composition belong to all his poetry.

There are a number of poems the melody of which is beautiful, in which, if there are discords, they are resolved into a happy concord at their close. There are others the melody of which is so strange, brilliant, and capturing that their sound is never forgotten. There are others the subtle, minor harmonies of which belong to and represent remote pathetic phases of human passion, and they, too, are heard by us in lonely hours of pitiful feeling, and enchant the ear and heart. And these will endure for the noble pleasure of man.

There are also poems the style of which is fitted most happily to the subject, like the Letter of Karshish to his Friend, in which Browning has been so seized by his subject, and yet has so mastered it, that he has forgotten to intercalate his own fancies; and in which, if the style is broken, it is broken in full harmony with the situation, and in obedience to the unity of impression he desired to make. There are others, like Abt Vogler, in which the style is extraordinarily noble, clear, and uplifted; and there are long passages in the more important poems, like Paracelsus, where the joy and glory of the thought and passion of Browning inform the verse with dignity, and make its march stately with solemn and beautiful music. Where the style and melody are thus fine the composition is also good. The parts, in their variety, belong to one another and to the unity of the whole. Style, melody and composition are always in the closest relation. And this nobleness of composition, style, and melody is chiefly found in those poems of his which have to do with the great matter of poetry—the representation of the universal and simple passions of human nature with their attendant and necessary thoughts. And there, in that part of his work, not in that other part for which he is unduly praised, and which belongs to the over-subtilised and over-intellectual time in which our self-conscious culture now is striving to resist its decay, and to prove that its disease is health, is the lasting power of Browning.

And then, beyond all these matters of form, there is the poet himself, alone among his fellows in his unique and individual power, who has fastened himself into our hearts, added a new world to our perceptions, developed our lives and enlarged our interests. And there are the separate and distinguished excellences of his work—the virtues which have no defects, the virtues, too, of his defects, all the new wonders of his realm—the many originalities which have justly earned for him that high and lonely seat on Parnassus on which his noble Shadow sits to-day, unchallenged in our time save by that other Shadow with whom, in reverence and love, we have been perhaps too bold to contrast him.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I state it roughly. The Poems of Two Brothers appeared in 1826, Tennyson's first single volume in 1830, his second in 1833, his last in 1892. Browning's first poem was issued in 1833, his last in 1890. Paracelsus, in which his genius clearly disclosed itself, was published in 1835, while Tennyson, seven years later, proved his mastership in the two volumes of 1842.

[2] A Death in the Desert touches on the doubts which, when it was written, had gathered from historical criticism round the subject matter of the Gospels, but the prophetic answer of St. John is not critical. It is Browning's personal reply to the critics, and is based on his own religious philosophy. The critical part of the argument is left untouched, and the answer is given from the poet's plane. It is the same when in the Parleyings with Certain People Furini is made to embody Browning's belief in a personal God in contradistinction with the mere evolutionist. He does not argue the points. He places one doctrine over against the other and bids the reader choose. Moreover, he claims his view as his own alone. He seeks to impose it on no one.

[3] Much has been said of the humour of Browning. But it is rather wit than humour which we perceive. The gentle pathos which belongs to humour, the pitiful turn of the humourist upon himself, his smile at his own follies and those of mankind, the half light, like that of evening, in which humour dwells, are wanting in Browning. It is true he has the charity of humour, though not its pathetic power. But, all the same, he is too keen, too brilliant, too fierce at times for a humourist. The light in which we see the foolish, fantastic, amusing or contemptible things of life is too bright for humour. He is a Wit—with charity—not a humourist. As for Tennyson, save in his Lincolnshire poems and Will Waterproof's Soliloquy, he was strangely devoid either of humour or of wit.

* * * * *



CHAPTER II

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

It is a difficult task to explain or analyse the treatment of Nature by Browning. It is easy enough to point out his remarkable love of her colour, his vivid painting of brief landscapes, his minute observation, his flashing way of description, his feeling for the breadth and freshness of Nature, his love of flowers and animals, and the way he has of hitting and emphasising the central point or light of a landscape. This is easy work, but it is not so easy to capture and define the way in which his soul, when he was alone, felt with regard to the heavens, and the earth and all that therein is. Others, like Wordsworth, have stated this plainly: Browning has nowhere defined his way. What his intellect held the Natural World to be, in itself; what it meant for man; the relation in which it stood to God and God to it—these things are partly plain. They have their attraction for us. It is always interesting to know what an imaginative genius thinks about such matters. But it is only a biographical or a half-scientific interest. But what we want to discover is how Browning, as a poet, felt the world of Nature. We have to try and catch the unconscious attitude of his soul when the Universe was at work around him, and he was for the time its centre—and this is the real difficulty.

Sometimes we imagine we have caught and fixed this elusive thing, but we finally give up the quest. The best we can do is to try to find the two or three general thoughts, the most frequently recurring emotions Browning had when Nature at sundry hours and in diverse manners displayed before him her beauty, splendour and fire, and seemed to ask his worship; or again, when she stood apart from him, with the mocking smile she often wears, and whispered in his ear, "Thou shall pursue me always, but never find my secret, never grasp my streaming hair." And both these experiences are to be found in Browning. Nature and he are sometimes at one, and sometimes at two; but seldom the first, and generally the second.

The natural world Tennyson describes is for the greater part of it a reflection of man, or used to heighten man's feeling, or to illustrate his action, or sentimentalised by memorial associations of humanity, or, finally, invented as a background for a human subject, and with a distinct direction towards that subject. Browning, with a few exceptions, does the exact opposite. His natural world is not made by our thought, nor does it reflect our passions. His illustrations, drawn from it, of our actions, break down at certain points, as if the illustrating material were alien from our nature. Nature, it is true, he thinks, leads up to man, and therefore has elements in her which are dim prophecies and prognostics of us; but she is only connected with us as the road is with the goal it reaches in the end. She exists independently of us, but yet she exists to suggest to us what we may become, to awaken in us dim longings and desires, to surprise us into confession of our inadequacy, to startle us with perceptions of an infinitude we do not possess as yet but may possess; to make us feel our ignorance, weakness, want of finish; and by partly exhibiting the variety, knowledge, love, power and finish of God, to urge us forward in humble pursuit to the infinite in him. The day Browning climbs Mont Saleve, at the beginning of his poem La Saisiaz, after a description of his climb in which he notes a host of minute quaintnesses in rock and flower, and especially little flares of colour, all of them unsentimentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top, and is smitten with the glory of the view. What does he see? Himself in Nature? or Nature herself, like a living being? Not at all. He sees what he thinks Nature is there to teach us—not herself, but what is beyond herself. "I was stationed," he cries, deliberately making this point, "face to face with—Nature?—rather with Infinitude." We are not in Nature: a part of God aspiring to the whole is there, but not the all of God. And Nature shows forth her glory, not to keep us with herself, but to send us on to her Source, of whom the universe is but a shred.

The universe of what we call matter in all its forms, which is the definition of Nature as I speak of it here, is one form to Browning of the creative joy of God: we are another form of the same joy. Nor does Browning conceive, as Wordsworth conceived, of any pre-established harmony between us and the natural world, so that Humanity and Nature can easily converse and live together; so that we can express our thoughts and emotions in terms of Nature; or so that Nature can have, as it were, a human soul. This is not Browning's conception. If he had such a conception he would frequently use in his descriptions what Ruskin calls the "pathetic fallacy," the use of which is excessively common in Tennyson. I can scarcely recall more than a very few instances of this in all the poetry of Browning. Even where it seems to occur, where Nature is spoken of in human terms, it does not really occur. Take this passage from James Lee's Wife:

Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, This autumn morning! How he sets his bones To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet For the ripple to run over in its mirth; Listening the while, where on the heap of stones The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.

The smile, the mirth, the listening, might be said to impute humanity to Nature: but the Earth and the Sea are plainly quite distinct from us. These are great giant creatures who are not ourselves: Titans who live with one another and not with us; and the terms of our humanity are used to make us aware of their separate existence from us, not of their being images only of our mind.

Another passage will illustrate the same habit of Browning's mind with nature. He describes, for the purpose of his general thought, in Fifine at the Fair, the course of a stormy sunset. The clouds, the sun, the night, act like men, and are written of in terms of humanity. But this is only to explain matters to us; the mighty creatures themselves have nothing to do with us. They live their own vast, indifferent life; and we see, like spectators, what they are doing, and do not understand what we see. The sunset seems to him the last act of an ever-recurring drama, in which the clouds barricade the Sun against his rest, and he plays with their opposition like the huge giant he is; till Night, with her terrific mace, angry with them for preventing the Sun from repose, repose which will make her Queen of the world, beats them into ruin. This is the passage:

For as on edifice of cloud i' the grey and green Of evening,—built about some glory of the west, To barricade the sun's departure,—manifest, He plays, pre-eminently gold, gilds vapour, crag and crest Which bend in rapt suspense above the act and deed They cluster round and keep their very own, nor heed The world at watch; while we, breathlessly at the base O' the castellated bulk, note momently the mace Of night fall here, fall there, bring change with every blow, Alike to sharpened shaft and broadened portico I' the structure; heights and depths, beneath the leaden stress Crumble and melt and mix together, coalesce, Reform, but sadder still, subdued yet more and more By every fresh defeat, till wearied eyes need pore No longer on the dull impoverished decadence Of all that pomp of pile in towering evidence So lately.

Fifine, cvi.

It is plain that Browning separates us altogether from the elemental life of these gigantic beings. And what is true of these passages is true, with one or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of Browning in which the pathetic fallacy seems to be used by him. I need not say how extraordinarily apart this method of his is from that of Tennyson. Then Tennyson, like Coleridge—only Tennyson is as vague and wavering in this belief as Coleridge is firm and clear in it—sometimes speaks as if Nature did not exist at all apart from our thought:

Her life the eddying of our living soul—

a possible, even a probable explanation. But it is not Browning's view. There is a celebrated passage in Paracelsus which is quite inconsistent with it. All Nature, from the beginning, is made to issue forth from the joy God has in making, in embodying his thought in form; and when one form has been made and rejoiced in, in making another still more lovely on the foundation of the last. So, joy after joy, the world was built, till, in the life of all he has made, God sees his ancient rapture of movement and power, and feels his delight renewed. I will not quote it here, but only mark that we and the "eddying of our living soul" have nothing to do with the making of this Nature. It is not even the thoughts of God in us. God and Nature are alone, and were alone together countless years before we were born. But man was the close of all. Nature was built up, through every stage, that man might know himself to be its close—its seal—but not it. It is a separate, unhuman form of God. Existing thus apart, it does a certain work on us, impressing us from without. The God in it speaks to the God in us. It may sometimes be said to be interested in us, but not like a man in a man. He even goes so far as to impute to Nature, but rarely, such an interest in us; but in reality he rather thinks that we, being Nature's end, have at such times touched for a moment some of those elements in her which have come down to us—elements apart from the soul. And Browning takes care, even when he represents Nature as suddenly at one with us, to keep up the separateness. The interest spoken of is not a human interest, nor resembles it. It is like the interest Ariel takes in Prospero and Miranda—an elemental interest, that of a creature whose nature knows its radical difference from human nature. If Nature sees us in sorrow or in joy, she knows, in these few passages of Browning's poetry, or seems to know, that we mourn or rejoice, and if she could feel with us she would; but she cannot quite do so. Like Ariel, she would be grieved with the grief of Gonzalo, were her affections human. She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. But sometimes she is made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When we are loving, and on the verge of such untroubled joy as Nature has always in her being, then she seems able, in Browning's poetry, actually to work for us, and help us into the fulness of our joy. In his poem, By the Fireside, he tells how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love. It is a passage full of his peculiar view of Nature. The place where the two lovers stay their footsteps on the hill knows all about them. "It is silent and aware." But it is apart from them also:

It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes, But that is its own affair.

And its silence also is its own. Those who linger there think that the place longs to speak; its bosom seems to heave with all it knows; but the desire is its own, not ours transferred to it. But when the two lovers were there, Nature, of her own accord, made up a spell for them and troubled them into speech:

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

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

Not one of the poets of this century would have thought in that fashion concerning Nature. Only for a second, man happened to be in harmony with the Powers at play in Nature. They took the two lovers up for a moment, made them one, and dropped them. "They relapsed to their ancient mood." The line is a whole lesson in Browning's view of Nature. But this special interest in us is rare, for we are seldom in the blessed mood of unselfconscious joy and love. When we are, on the other hand, self-conscious, or in doubt, or out of harmony with love and joy, or anxious for the transient things of the world—Nature, unsympathetic wholly, mocks and plays with us like a faun. When Sordello climbs the ravine, thinking of himself as Apollo, the wood, "proud of its observer," a mocking phrase, "tried surprises on him, stratagems and games."

Or, our life is too small for her greatness. When we are unworthy our high lineage, noisy or mean, then we

quail before a quiet sky Or sea, too little for their quietude.

That is a phrase which might fall in with Wordsworth's theory of Nature, but this which follows from The Englishman in Italy, is only Browning's. The man has climbed to the top of Calvano,

And God's own profound Was above me, and round me the mountains, And under, the sea, And within me, my heart to bear witness What was and shall be.

He is worthy of the glorious sight; full of eternal thoughts. Wordsworth would then have made the soul of Nature sympathise with his soul. But Browning makes Nature manifest her apartness from the man. The mountains know nothing of his soul: they amuse themselves with him; they are even half angry with him for his intrusion—a foreigner who dares an entrance into their untrespassed world. Tennyson could not have thought that way. It is true the mountains are alive in the poet's thought, but not with the poet's life: nor does he touch them with his sentiment.

Oh, those mountains, their infinite movement Still moving with you; For, ever some new head and heart of them Thrusts into view To observe the intruder; you see it If quickly you turn And, before they escape you surprise them. They grudge you should learn How the soft plains they look on, lean over And love (they pretend)— Cower beneath them.

Total apartness from us! Nature mocking, surprising us; watching us from a distance, even pleased to see us going to our destruction. We may remember how the hills look grimly on Childe Roland when he comes to the tower. The very sunset comes back to see him die:

before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.—

Then, as if they loved to see the death of their quarry, cried, without one touch of sympathy:

"Now stab and end the creature—to the heft!"

And once, so divided from our life is her life, she pities her own case and refuses our pity. Man cannot help her. The starved, ignoble country in Childe Roland, one of the finest pieces of description in Browning, wicked, waste and leprous land, makes Nature herself sick with peevish wrath. "I cannot help my case," she cries. "Nothing but the Judgment's fire can cure the place."

On the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more, Nature is alive in Browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all at one with us. Tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise her. The other poets of the century do make her alive, but they harmonise her in one way or another with us. Browning is distinct from them all in keeping her quite divided from man.

But then he has observed that Nature is expressed in terms of man, and he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to explain this. He does explain it in a passage in Paracelsus. Man once descried, imprints for ever

His presence on all lifeless things; the winds Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, Never a senseless gust now man is born. The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts A secret they assemble to discuss When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph Swims bearing high above her head: no bird Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above That let light in upon the gloomy woods, A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top, Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye. The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour. Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn Beneath a warm moon like a happy face: —And this to fill us with regard for Man.

He does not say, as the other poets do, that the pines really commune, or that the morn has enterprise, or that nymphs and satyrs live in the woods, but that this seems to be, because man, as the crown of the natural world, throws back his soul and his soul's life on all the grades of inferior life which preceded him. It is Browning's contradiction of any one who thinks that the pathetic fallacy exists in his poetry.

Nature has then a life of her own, her own joys and sorrows, or rather, only joy. Browning, indeed, with his intensity of imagination and his ineradicable desire of life, was not the man to conceive Nature as dead, as having no conscious being of any kind. He did not impute a personality like ours to Nature, but he saw joy and rapture and play, even love, moving in everything; and sometimes headded to this delight she has in herself—and just because the creature was not human—a touch of elemental unmoral malice, a tricksome sportiveness like that of Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream. The life, then, of Nature had no relation of its own to our life; but we had some relation to it because we were conscious that we were its close and its completion.

It follows from this idea of Browning's that he was capable of describing Nature as she is, without adding any deceiving mist of human sentiment to his descriptions; and of describing her as accurately and as vividly as Tennyson, even more vividly, because of his extraordinary eye for colour. And Nature, so described, is of great interest in Browning's poetry.

But, then, in any description of Nature, we desire the entrance into such description of some human feeling so that it may be a more complete theme for poetry. Browning does this in a different way from Tennyson, who gives human feelings and thoughts to Nature, or steeps it in human memories. Browning catches Nature up into himself, and the human element is not in Nature but in him, in what he thinks and feels, in all that Nature, quite apart from him, awakens in him. Sometimes he even goes so far as to toss Nature aside altogether, as unworthy to be thought of in comparison with humanity. That joy in Nature herself, for her own sake, which was so distinguishing a mark of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats, is rarely, if ever, found in Browning. This places him apart. What he loved was man; and save at those times of which I have spoken, when he conceives Nature as the life and play and wrath and fancy of huge elemental powers like gods and goddesses, he uses her as a background only for human life. She is of little importance unless man be present, and then she is no more than the scenery in a drama. Take the first two verses of A Lovers' Quarrel,

Oh, what a dawn of day! How the March sun feels like May! All is blue again After last night's rain, And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.

That is well done—he has liked what he saw. But what is it all, he thinks; what do I care about it? And he ends the verse:

Only, my Love's away! I'd as lief that the blue were grey.

Then take the next verse:

Runnels, which rillets swell. Must be dancing down the dell, With a foaming head On the beryl bed Paven smooth as a hermit's cell.

It is excellent description, but it is only scenery for the real passion in Browning's mind.

Each with a tale to tell— Could my Love but attend as well.

By the Fireside illustrates the same point. No description can be better, more close, more observed, than of the whole walk over the hill; but it is mere scenery for the lovers. The real passion lies in their hearts.

We have then direct description of Nature; direct description of man sometimes as influenced by Nature; sometimes Nature used as the scenery of human passion; but no intermingling of them both. Each is for ever distinct. The only thing that unites them in idea, and in the end, is that both have proceeded from the creative joy of God.

Of course this way of thinking permits of the things of Nature being used to illustrate the doings, thinkings and character of man; and in none of his poems is such illustration better used than in Sordello. There is a famous passage, in itself a noble description of the opulent generativeness of a warm land like Italy, in which he compares the rich, poetic soul of Sordello to such a land, and the lovely line in it,

And still more labyrinthine buds the rose,

holds in its symbolism the whole essence of a great artist's nature. I quote the passage. It describes Sordello, and it could not better describe Italy:

Sordello foremost in the regal class Nature has broadly severed from the mass Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames Some happy lands, that have luxurious names, For loose fertility; a footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices; mere decay Produces richer life; and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.

That compares to the character of a whole country the character of a whole type of humanity. I take another of such comparisons, and it is as minute as this is broad, and done with as great skill and charm. Sordello is full of poetic fancies, touched and glimmering with the dew of youth, and he has woven them around the old castle where he lives. Browning compares the young man's imaginative play to the airy and audacious labour of the spider. He, that is, Sordello,

O'er-festooning every interval, As the adventurous spider, making light Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, From barbican to battlement: so flung Fantasies forth and in their centre swung Our architect,—the breezy morning fresh Above, and merry,—all his waving mesh Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.

It could not be better done. The description might stand alone, but better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse, and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth.

Again, in A Bean-stripe: also Apple-Eating, Ferishtah is asked—Is life a good or bad thing, white or black? "Good," says Ferishtah, "if one keeps moving. I only move. When I stop, I may stop in a black place or a white. But everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and colour on them as I move. It is I who make life good or bad, black or white. I am like the moon going through vapour"—and this is the illustration:

Mark the flying orb Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through This was and is and will be evermore Coloured in permanence? The glory swims Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight By night's abysmal gloom, unglorified Behind as erst before the advancer: gloom? Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds From the abandoned heaven a next surprise. And where's the gloom now?—silver-smitten straight, One glow and variegation! So, with me, Who move and make,—myself,—the black, the white. The good, the bad, of life's environment.

Fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in Browning image what is in man from that which is within Nature—hints, prognostics, prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.

There is, however, one human passion which Browning conceives as existing in Nature—the passion of joy. But it is a different joy from ours. It is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter even for a brief hour into the rapture of Nature. That rapture, in Browning's thought, was derived from the creative thought of God exercising itself with delight in the incessant making of Nature. And its manifestation was life, that joyful rush of life in all things into fuller and fuller being. No poet felt this ecstasy of mere living in Nature more deeply than Browning. His own rapture (the word is not too strong) in it appears again and again in his poetry, and when it does, Browning is not a man sympathising from without with Nature. He is then a part of Nature herself, a living piece of the great organism, having his own rejoicing life in the mightier life which includes him; and feeling, with the rest, the abounding pleasure of continuous life reaching upwards through growth to higher forms of being, swifter powers of living. I might give many examples, but one will suffice, and it is the more important because it belongs not to his ardent youth, but to his mature manhood. It is part of the song of Thamyris in Aristophanes' Apology. Thamyris, going to meet the Muses in rivalry, sings as he walks in the splendid morning the song of the rapture of the life of Earth, and is himself part of the rejoicing movement.

Thamuris, marching, laughed "Each flake of foam" (As sparklingly the ripple raced him by) "Mocks slower clouds adrift in the blue dome!"

For Autumn was the season; red the sky Held morn's conclusive signet of the sun To break the mists up, bid them blaze and die.

Morn had the mastery as, one by one All pomps produced themselves along the tract From earth's far ending to near heaven begun.

Was there a ravaged tree? it laughed compact With gold, a leaf-ball crisp, high brandished now, Tempting to onset frost which late attacked.

Was there a wizened shrub, a starveling bough, A fleecy thistle filched from by the wind, A weed, Pan's trampling hoof would disallow?

Each, with a glory and a rapture twined About it, joined the rush of air and light And force: the world was of one joyous mind.

Say not the birds flew! they forebore their right— Swam, revelling onward in the roll of things. Say not the beasts' mirth bounded! that was flight—

How could the creatures leap, no lift of wings? Such earth's community of purpose, such The ease of earth's fulfilled imaginings,—

So did the near and far appear to touch I' the moment's transport,—that an interchange Of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much;

And had the rooted plant aspired to range With the snake's licence, while the insect yearned To glow fixed as the flower, it were not strange—

No more than if the fluttery tree-top turned To actual music, sang itself aloft; Or if the wind, impassioned chantress, earned

The right to soar embodied in some soft Fine form all fit for cloud companionship, And, blissful, once touch beauty chased so oft.

Thamuris, marching, let no fancy slip Born of the fiery transport; lyre and song Were his, to smite with hand and launch from lip—

The next thing to touch on is his drawing of landscape, not now of separate pieces of Nature, but of the whole view of a land seen under a certain aspect of the heavens. All the poets ought to be able to do this well, and I drew attention to the brief, condensed, yet fan-opening fashion in which Tennyson has done it. Sometimes the poets describe what they see before them, or have seen; drawing directly from Nature. Sometimes they invent a wide or varied landscape as a background for a human subject, and arrange and tone it for that purpose. Shelley did this with great stateliness and subtlety. Browning does not do it, except, perhaps, in Christmas-Eve, when he prepares the night for the appearance of Christ. Nevertheless, even in Christmas-Eve, the description of the lunar rainbow is of a thing he has seen, of a not-invented thing, and it is as clear, vivid and natural as it can be; only it is heightened and thrilled through by the expectancy and the thrill in Browning's soul which the reader feels and which the poet, through his emotion, makes the reader comprehend. But there is no suggestion that any of this feeling exists in Nature. The rainbow has no consciousness of the vision to come or of the passion in the poet (as it would have had in Wordsworth), and therefore is painted with an accuracy undimmed by any transference to Nature of the soul of the poet.

I quote the piece; it is a noble specimen of his landscape work:

But lo, what think you? suddenly The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky Received at once the full fruition Of the moon's consummate apparition. The black cloud barricade was riven, Ruined beneath her feet, and driven Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless, North and South and East lay ready For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, Sprang across them and stood steady.

'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect, From heaven to heaven extending, perfect As the mother-moon's self, full in face. It rose, distinctly at the base With its severe proper colours chorded Which still, in the rising, were compressed, Until at last they coalesced, And supreme the spectral creature lorded In a triumph of whitest white,— Above which intervened the night. But above night too, like only the next, The second of a wondrous sequence, Reaching in rare and rarer frequence, Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, Another rainbow rose, a mightier, Fainter, flushier and flightier,— Rapture dying along its verge. Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge, Whose, from the straining topmost dark, On to the key-stone of that arc?

This is only a piece of sky, though I have called it landscape work. But then the sky is frequently treated alone by Browning; and is always present in power over his landscapes—it, and the winds in it. This is natural enough for one who lived so much in Italy, where the scenery of the sky is more superb than that of the earth—so various, noble and surprising that when Nature plays there, as a poet, her tragedy and comedy, one scarcely takes the trouble of considering the earth.

However, we find an abundance of true landscapes in Browning. They are, with a few exceptions, Italian; and they have that grandeur and breadth, that intensity given by blazing colour, that peculiar tint either of labyrinthine or of tragic sentiment which belong to Italy. I select a few of them:

The morn when first it thunders in March The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say; As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch Of the villa gate this warm March day, No flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled In the valley beneath where, white and wide Washed by the morning water-gold, Florence lay out on the mountain side River and bridge and street and square Lay mine, as much at my beck and call, Through the live translucent bath of air, As the sights in a magic crystal ball.

Here is the Roman Campagna and its very sentiment:

The champaign with its endless fleece Of feathery grasses everywhere! Silence and passion, joy and peace, An everlasting wash of air— Rome's ghost since her decease.

And this might be in the same place:

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep Half-asleep Tinkle homeward through the twilight—

This is a crimson sunset over dark and distant woods in autumn:

That autumn eve was stilled: A last remains of sunset dimly burned O'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned By the wind back upon its bearer's hand In one long flare of crimson; as a brand The woods beneath lay black. A single eye From all Verona cared for the soft sky.

And if we desire a sunrise, there is the triumphant beginning of Pippa Passes—a glorious outburst of light, colour and splendour, impassioned and rushing, the very upsoaring of Apollo's head behind his furious steeds. It begins with one word, like a single stroke on the gong of Nature: it continues till the whole of the overarching vault, and the world below, in vast disclosure, is flooded with an ocean of gold.

Day! Faster and more fast, O'er night's brim, day boils at last; Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim Where spurting and suppressed it lay. For not a froth-flake touched the rim Of yonder gap in the solid gray Of the eastern cloud, an hour away; But forth one wavelet, then another, curled. Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, Rose, reddened, and its seething breast Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.

This is chiefly of the sky, but the description in that gipsy-hearted poem, The Flight of the Duchess, brings before us, at great length, league after league of wide-spreading landscape. It is, first, of the great wild country, cornfield, vineyards, sheep-ranges, open chase, till we arrive at last at the mountains; and climbing up among their pines, dip down into a yet vaster and wilder country, a red, drear, burnt-up plain, over which we are carried for miles:

Till at the last, for a bounding belt, Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore.

Or we may read the Grammarian's Funeral, where we leave the city walls and climb the peak on whose topmost ledge he is to be buried. As we ascend the landscape widens; we see it expanding in the verse. Moreover, with a wonderful power, Browning makes us feel the air grow keener, fresher, brighter, more soundless and lonelier. That, too, is given by the verse; it is a triumph in Nature-poetry.

Nor is he less effective in narrow landscape, in the description of small shut-in spaces of Nature. There is the garden at the beginning of Paracelsus; the ravine, step by step, in Pauline; the sea-beach, and its little cabinet landscapes, in James Lee's Wife; the exquisite pictures of the path over the Col di Colma in By the Fireside—for though the whole of the landscape is given, yet each verse almost might stand as a small picture by itself. It is one of Browning's favourite ways of description, to walk slowly through the landscape, describing step by step those parts of it which strike him, and leaving to us to combine the parts into the whole. But his way of combination is to touch the last thing he describes with human love, and to throw back this atmosphere of feeling over all the pictures he has made. The verses I quote do this.

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

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

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

There are many such miniatures of Nature in Browning's poetry. Sometimes, however, the pictures are larger and nobler, when the natural thing described is in itself charged with power, terror or dignity. I give one instance of this, where the fierce Italian thunderstorm is enhanced by being the messenger of God's vengeance on guilt. It is from Pippa Passes. The heaven's pillars are over-bowed with heat. The black-blue canopy descends close on Ottima and Sebald.

Buried in woods we lay, you recollect; Swift ran the searching tempest overhead; And ever and anon some bright white shaft Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, As if God's messenger thro' the close wood-screen Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke The thunder like a whole sea overhead—

That is as splendid as the thing itself.

Again, no one can help observing in all these quotations the extraordinary love of colour, a love Tennyson has in far fainter measure, but which Browning seems to possess more than any other English poet. Only Sir Walter Scott approaches him in this. Scott, knowing the Highlands, knew dark magnificence of colour. But Browning's love of colour arose from his having lived so long in Italy, where the light is so pure, clear, and brilliant that colour is more intense, and at dawn and sunset more deep, delicate, and various than it is in our land. Sometimes, as Ruskin says, "it is not colour, it is conflagration"; but wherever it is, in the bell of a flower, on the edge of a cloud, on the back of a lizard, on the veins of a lichen, it strikes in Browning's verse at our eyes, and he only, in English poetry, has joy enough in it to be its full interpreter.

He sees the wild tulip blow out its great red bell; he sees the thin clear bubble of blood at its tip; he sees the spike of gold which burns deep in the bluebell's womb; the corals that, like lamps, disperse thick red flame through the dusk green universe of the ocean; the lakes which, when the morn breaks,

Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun;

the woodland brake whose withered fern Dawn feeds with gold; the moon carried oft at sunrise in purple fire; the larch-blooms crisp and pink; the sanguine heart of the pomegranate; the filberts russet-sheathed and velvet-capped; the poppies crimson to blackness; the red fans of the butterfly falling on the rock like a drop of fire from a brandished torch; the star-fish, rose-jacynth to the finger-tips; and a hundred other passionate seizures of colour. And, for the last of these colour remembrances, in quieter tints—almost in black and white—I quote this lovely verse from James Lee's Wife:

The swallow has set her six young on the rail, And looks seaward: The water's in stripes like a snake, olive pale To the leeward,— On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind. "Good fortune departs, and disaster's behind"— Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!

So, not only do we possess all these landscapes but we possess them in colour. They are painted as well as drawn. It is his love of colour which made at least half of the impulse that drove him at times into Impressionism. Good drawing is little to the impressionist painters. It is the sudden glow, splash or flicker of colour that moves them, which makes on them the swift, the momentary impression they wish to record.

And colour acted on Browning in the same way. I said he had been impressionist, when he liked, for forty years before Impressionism was born in modern art. He was so, because from the beginning he saw things in colour, more than in light and shade. It is well worth a reader's while to search him for colour-impressions. I take one, for example, with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of gold and green:

Fancy the Pampas' sheen! Miles and miles of gold and green Where the sunflowers blow In a solid glow, And—to break now and then the screen— Black neck and eyeballs keen, Up a wild horse leaps between!

Having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the work done in it by men of all classes and the natural objects that encompassed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them, like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented. This he has done specially in two poems: The Englishman in Italy, where the vast shell of the Sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and truth. The second of these poems is Up at a Villa—Down in the City, where a farm of the Casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with the street-life of Florence; and both are described through the delightful character whom he invents to see them. These poems are astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery.

Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly described them. It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the filmy insect in the sunshine. I give a few examples. Mortal man could not see a lynx more clearly than Karshish—

A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear; Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls.

And the very soul of the Eagle is in this question—

Ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once Into the vast and unexplored abyss, What full-grown power informs her from the first, Why she not marvels, strenuously beating The silent boundless regions of the sky!

He has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly,

but forced the earth his couch to make Far inland, till his friend the tempest wake,

on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity.

In Caliban upon Setebos, as would naturally be the case, animal life is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear in the few lines I quote:

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

That is enough to prove his power. And the animals are seen, not as a cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by thoughts, sees them; for Browning, with his curious self-transmuting power, has put himself into the skin of Caliban. Then again, in that lovely lyric in Paracelsus,

Thus the Mayne glideth,

the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river. Elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the water, the swallow flying to Venice—"that stout sea-farer"—the lark shivering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great bird of the Imagination, the Phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid verse records the sight:

As the King-bird with ages on his plumes Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.

Not less wonderful, and more unique in English poetry, is his painting of insects. He describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day. He strikes out the grasshopper at a touch—

Chirrups the contumacious grasshopper.

He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood:

Child of the simmering quiet, there to die.

He sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and the wasps pricking the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early moths craving their food from God when dawn awakes them, and the fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider, sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the edge of tombs. These are but a few things out of this treasure-house of animal observation and love. It is a love which animates and populates with life his landscapes.

Many of the points I have attempted here to make are illustrated in Saul. In verse v. the sheep are pictured, with all a shepherd's delightful affection, coming back at evening to the folding; and, with David's poetic imagination, compared to the stars following one another into the meadows of night—

And now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star Into eve and the blue far above us,—so blue and so far!—

In verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by David's music. In verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,—till all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose rapture Browning loved so well. These fully reveal his poetic communion with animals. Then, there is a fine passage in verse x. where he describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the mountain-side[4]—an occurrence which also drew the interest on Shelley in the Prometheus—which illustrates what I have said of Browning's conception of the separate life, as of giant Titans, of the vaster things in Nature. The mountain is alive and lives his life with his own grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when it pleases him. It is only David who thinks that the great creature lives to guard us from the tempests. And Hebron, high on its crested hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fashion,

For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.

Then, at the end of the poem, Browning represents all Nature as full of emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the coming of immortal Love in Christ to man. This sympathy of Nature with humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. If that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet, impassioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual view into another land of thought.

There is one more thing to say in closing this chapter. Browning, unlike Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. He drew directly from nature. The landscapes in Pauline and Sordello, and in the lyrical poems are plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the rock and the painted shell on the seashore. Even the imaginative landscape of Childe Roland is a memory, not an invention. I do not say he would have been incapable of such invented landscape as we find in Oenone and the Lotos-Eaters, but it was not his way to do this. However, he does it once; but he takes care to show that it is not real landscape he is drawing, but landscape in a picture. In Gerard de Lairesse, one of the poems in Parleyings with Certain People, he sets himself to rival the "Walk" in Lairesse's Art of Painting, and he invents as a background to mythological or historic scenes, five landscapes, of dawn, morning, and noon, evening and falling night. They may be compared with the walk in Pauline, and indeed one of them with its deep pool watched over by the trees recalls his description of a similar pool in Pauline—a lasting impression of his youth, for it is again used in Sordello. These landscapes are some of his most careful natural description. They begin with the great thunderstorm of dawn in which Prometheus is seen riveted to his rock and the eagle-hound of Zeus beside him. Then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth and Artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then noon with Lyda and the Satyr—that sad story; then evening charged with the fate of empires; and then the night, and in it a vast ghost, the ghost of departing glory and beauty. The descriptions are too long to quote, but far too short to read. I would that Browning had done more of this excellent work; but that these were created when he was an old man proves that the fire of imagination burnt in him to the end. They are full of those keen picture-words in which he smites into expression the central point of a landscape. They realise the glory of light, the force, fierceness, even the quiet of Nature, but they have lost a great deal of the colour of which once he was so lavish. Nevertheless, the whole scheme of colour in these pictures, with their figures, recalls the pictures of Tintoret. They have his furia, his black, gold, and sombre purple, his white mist and barred clouds and the thunder-roar in his skies. Nor are Prometheus and Artemis, and Lyda on her heap of skins in the deep woods, unworthy of the daring hand of the great Venetian. They seem to stand forth from his canvas.

The poem closes with a charming lyric, half-sad, half-joyful, in which he hails the spring, and which in itself is full of his heart when it was close to the hopefulness he drew from natural beauty. I quote it to close this chapter:

Dance, yellows and whites and reds, Lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads Astir with the wind in the tulip-beds.

There's sunshine; scarcely a wind at all Disturbs starved grass and daisies small On a certain mound by a churchyard wall.

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

FOOTNOTES:

[4] David could only have seen this on the upper slopes of Hermon. But at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could scarcely have visited the north of Palestine. Indeed, he does not seem all his life long to have been near Hermon. Browning has transferred to David what he himself had seen in Switzerland.

* * * * *



CHAPTER III

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a poet of Nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other elements in his natural description which demand attention. The best way to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leaving out those on which we have already touched. New points of interest will thus arise; and, moreover, taking his natural description as it occurs from volume to volume, we may be able—within this phase of his poetic nature—to place his poetic development in a clearer light.

I begin, therefore, with Pauline. The descriptions of nature in that poem are more deliberate, more for their own sake, than elsewhere in Browning's poetry. The first of them faintly recalls the manner of Shelley in the Alastor, and I have no doubt was influenced by him. The two others, and the more finished, have already escaped from Shelley, and are almost pre-Raphaelite, as much so as Keats, in their detail. Yet all the three are original, not imitative. They suggest Shelley and Keats, and no more, and it is only the manner and not the matter of these poets that they suggest. Browning became instantly original in this as in other modes of poetry. It was characteristic of him from the beginning to the end of his career, to possess within himself his own methods, to draw out of himself new matter and new shapings.

From one point of view this was full of treasureable matter for us. It is not often the gods give us so opulent an originality. From another point of view it was unfortunate. If he had begun by imitating a little; if he had studied the excellences of his predecessors more; if he had curbed his individuality sufficiently to mark, learn and inwardly digest the noble style of others in natural description, and in all other matters of poetry as well, his work would have been much better than it is; his original excellences would have found fitter and finer expression; his faults would have been enfeebled instead of being developed; his style would have been more concise on one side, less abrupt on another, and we should not have been wrongly disturbed by obscurities of diction and angularities of expression. He would have reached more continuously the splendid level he often attained. This is plentifully illustrated by his work on external nature, but less perhaps than by his work on humanity.

The first natural description he published is in the beginning of Pauline:

Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter Crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath Blew soft from the moist hills; the blackthorn boughs, So dark in the bare wood, when glistening In the sunshine were white with coming buds, Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.

That is fairly good; he describes what he has seen; but it might have been better. We know what he means, but his words do not accurately or imaginatively convey this meaning. The best lines are the first three, but the peculiar note of Shelley sighs so fully in them that they do not represent Browning. What is special in them is his peculiar delight not only in the morning which here he celebrates, but in the spring. It was in his nature, even in old age, to love with passion the beginnings of things; dawn, morning, spring and youth, and their quick blood; their changes, impulses, their unpremeditated rush into fresh experiment. Unlike Tennyson, who was old when he was old, Browning was young when he was old. Only once in Asolando, in one poem, can we trace that he felt winter in his heart. And the lines in Pauline which I now quote, spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old:

As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew, The morning swallows with their songs like words. All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts: So, aught connected with my early life, My rude songs or my wild imaginings, How I look on them—most distinct amid The fever and the stir of after years!

The next description in Pauline is that in which he describes—to illustrate what Shelley was to him—the woodland spring which became a mighty river. Shelley, as first conceived by Browning, seemed to him like a sacred spring:

Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross, And one small tree embowers droopingly— Joying to see some wandering insect won To live in its few rushes, or some locust To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air.

A piece of careful detail, close to nature, but not close enough; needing to be more detailed or less detailed, but the first instance in his work of his deliberate use of Nature, not for love of herself only, (Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron would have described the spring in the woods for its own sake), but for illustration of humanity. It is Shelley—Shelley in his lonely withdrawn character, Shelley hidden in the wood of his own thoughts, and, like a spring in that wood, bubbling upwards into personal poetry—of whom Browning is now thinking. The image is good, but a better poet would have dwelt more on the fountain and left the insects and birds alone. It is Shelley also of whom he thinks—Shelley breaking away from personal poetry to write of the fates of men, of liberty and love and overthrow of wrong, of the future of mankind—when he expands his tree-shaded fountain into the river and follows it to the sea:

And then should find it but the fountain head, Long lost, of some great river washing towns And towers, and seeing old woods which will live But by its banks untrod of human foot. Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering In light as some thing lieth half of life Before God's foot, waiting a wondrous change; Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay Its course in vain, for it does ever spread Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on, Being the pulse of some great country—so Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!

How good some of that is; how bad it is elsewhere! How much it needs thought, concentration, and yet how vivid also and original! And the faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of irritating parenthesis, of broken threads of thought, of inability to leave out the needless, are faults of which Browning never quite cleared his work. I do not think he ever cared to rid himself of them.

The next description is not an illustration of man by means of Nature. It is almost the only set description of Nature, without reference to man, which occurs in the whole of Browning's work. It is introduced by his declaration (for in this I think he speaks from himself) of his power of living in the life of all living things. He does not think of himself as living in the whole Being of Nature, as Wordsworth or Shelley might have done. There was a certain matter of factness in him which prevented his belief in any theory of that kind. But he does transfer himself into the rejoicing life of the animals and plants, a life which he knows is akin to his own. And this distinction is true of all his poetry of Nature. "I can mount with the bird," he says,

Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree, Or like a fish breathe deep the morning air In the misty sun-warm water.

This introduces the description of a walk of twenty-four hours through various scenes of natural beauty. It is long and elaborate—the scenery he conceives round the home where he and Pauline are to live. And it is so close, and so much of it is repeated in other forms in his later poetry, that I think it is drawn direct from Nature; that it is here done of set purpose to show his hand in natural description. It begins with night, but soon leaves night for the morning and the noon. Here is a piece of it:

Morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods. How the sun brightens in the mist, and here, Half in the air, like[5] creatures of the place, Trusting the elements, living on high boughs That sway in the wind—look at the silver spray Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract Amid the broken rocks! Shall we stay here With the wild hawks? No, ere the hot noon come Dive we down—safe! See, this is our new retreat Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, Dark, tangled, old and green, still sloping down To a small pool whose waters lie asleep, Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants: And tall trees overarch to keep us in, Breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts, And in the dreamy water one small group Of two or three strange trees are got together Wondering at all around—

This is nerveless work, tentative, talkative, no clear expression of the whole; and as he tries to expand it further in lines we may study with interest, for the very failures of genius are interesting, he becomes even more feeble. Yet the feebleness is traversed by verses of power, like lightning flashing through a mist upon the sea. The chief thing to say about this direct, detailed work is that he got out of its manner as fast as he could. He never tried it again, but passed on to suggest the landscape by a few sharp, high-coloured words; choosing out one or two of its elements and flashing them into prominence. The rest was left to the imagination of the reader.

He is better when he comes forth from the shadowy woodland-pool into the clear air and open landscape:

Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods! See, they part like a ruined arch: the sky! Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick, Floating away in the sun in some north sea. Air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air, The clear, dear breath of God that loveth us, Where small birds reel and winds take their delight!

The last three lines are excellent, but nothing could be worse than the sensational image of the dead whale. It does not fit the thing he desires to illustrate, and it violates the sentiment of the scene he is describing, but its strangeness pleased his imagination, and he put it in without a question. Alas, in after times, he only too often, both in the poetry of nature and of the human soul, hurried into his verse illustrations which had no natural relation to the matter in hand, just because it amused him to indulge his fancy. The finished artist could not do this; he would hear, as it were, the false note, and reject it. But Browning, a natural artist, never became a perfect one. Nevertheless, as his poetry went on, he reached, by natural power, splendid description, as indeed I have fully confessed; but, on the other hand, one is never sure of him. He is never quite "inevitable."

The attempt at deliberate natural description in Pauline, of which I have now spoken, is not renewed in Paracelsus. By the time he wrote that poem the movement and problem of the spirit of man had all but quenched his interest in natural scenery. Nature is only introduced as a background, almost a scenic background for the players, who are the passions, thoughts, and aspirations of the intellectual life of Paracelsus. It is only at the beginning of Part II. that we touch a landscape:

Over the waters in the vaporous West The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold Behind the arm of the city, which between; With all the length of domes and minarets, Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs Like a Turk verse along a scimitar.

That is all; nothing but an introduction. Paracelsus turns in a moment from the sight, and absorbs himself in himself, just as Browning was then doing in his own soul. Nearly two thousand lines are then written before Nature is again touched upon, and then Festus and Paracelsus are looking at the dawn; and it is worth saying how in this description Browning's work on Nature has so greatly improved that one can scarcely believe he is the same poet who wrote the wavering descriptions of Pauline. This is close and clear:

Morn must be near.

FESTUS. Best ope the casement: see, The night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars, Is blank and motionless: how peaceful sleep The tree-tops all together! Like an asp[6] The wind slips whispering from bough to bough.

* * *

PARACELSUS. See, morn at length. The heavy darkness seems Diluted, grey and clear without the stars; The shrubs bestir and rouse themselves as if Some snake, that weighed them down all night, let go His hold; and from the East, fuller and fuller, Day, like a mighty river, flowing in; But clouded, wintry, desolate and cold.

That is good, clear, and sufficient; and there the description should end. But Browning, driven by some small demon, adds to it three lines of mere observant fancy.

Yet see how that broad prickly star-shaped plant, Half-down in the crevice, spreads its woolly leaves, All thick and glistening with diamond dew.

What is that for? To give local colour or reality? It does neither. It is mere childish artistry. Tennyson could not have done it. He knew when to stay his hand.[7]

The finest piece of natural description in Paracelsus is of the coming of Spring. It is full of the joy of life; it is inspired by a passionate thought, lying behind it, concerning man. It is still more inspired by his belief that God himself was eternal joy and filled the universe with rapture. Nowhere did Browning reach a greater height in his Nature poetry than in these lines, yet they are more a description, as usual, of animal life than of the beauty of the earth and sea:

Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face; The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms Like chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews His ancient rapture.

Once more, in Paracelsus, there is the lovely lyric about the flowing of the Mayne. I have driven through that gracious country of low hill and dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered banks only a foot high the slow river winds in gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the sentiment of the scenery. But, as before, Browning quickly slides away from the beauty of inanimate nature into a record of the animals that haunt the stream. He could not get on long with mountains and rivers alone. He must people them with breathing, feeling things; anything for life!

Thus the Mayne glideth Where my Love abideth. Sleep's no softer; it proceeds On through lawns, on through meads, On and on, whate'er befall, Meandering and musical, Though the niggard pasturage Bears not on its shaven ledge Aught but weeds and waving grasses To view the river as it passes, Save here and there a scanty patch Of primroses too faint to catch A weary bee. And scarce it pushes Its gentle way through strangling rushes Where the glossy kingfisher Flutters when noon-heats are near, Glad the shelving banks to shun Red and steaming in the sun, Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat Burrows, and the speckled stoat; Where the quick sandpipers flit In and out the marl and grit That seems to breed them, brown as they: Naught disturbs its quiet way, Save some lazy stork that springs, Trailing it with legs and wings, Whom the shy fox from the hill Rouses, creep he ne'er so still.

"My heart, they loose my heart, those simple words," cries Paracelsus, and he was right. They tell of that which to see and love is better, wiser, than to probe and know all the problems of knowledge. But that is a truth not understood, not believed. And few there be who find it. And if Browning had found the secret of how to live more outside of his understanding than he did, or having found it, had not forgotten it, he would not perhaps have spoken more wisely for the good of man, but he would have more continuously written better poetry.

The next poem in which he may be said to touch Nature is Sordello. Strafford does not count, save for the charming song of the boat in music and moonlight, which the children sing. In Sordello, the problem of life, as in Paracelsus, is still the chief matter, but outward life, as not in Paracelsus, takes an equal place with inward life. And naturally, Nature, its changes and beauty, being outward, are more fully treated than in Paracelsus. But it is never treated for itself alone. It is made to image or reflect the sentiment of the man who sees it, or to illustrate a phase of his passion or his thought. But there is a closer grip upon it than before, a clearer definition, a greater power of concentrated expression of it, and especially, a fuller use of colour. Browning paints Nature now like a Venetian; the very shadows of objects are in colour. This new power was a kind of revelation to him, and he frequently uses it with a personal joy in its exercise. Things in Nature blaze in his poetry now and afterwards in gold, purple, the crimson of blood, in sunlit green and topaz, in radiant blue, in dyes of earthquake and eclipse. Then, when he has done his landscape thus in colour, he adds more; he places in its foreground one drop, one eye of still more flaming colour, to vivify and inflame the whole.

The main landscape of Sordello is the plain and the low pine-clad hills around Mantua; the half-circle of the deep lagoon which enarms the battlemented town; and the river Mincio, seen by Sordello when he comes out of the forest on the hill, as it enters and leaves the lagoon, and winds, a silver ribbon, through the plain. It is the landscape Vergil must have loved. A long bridge of more than a hundred arches, with towers of defence, crosses the marsh from the towered gateway of the walls to the mainland, and in the midst of the lagoon the deep river flows fresh and clear with a steady swiftness. Scarcely anywhere in North Italy is the upper sky more pure at dawn and even, and there is no view now so mystic in its desolation. Over the lagoon, and puffing from it, the mists, daily encrimsoned by sunrise and sunset, continually rise and disperse.

The character and the peculiarities of this landscape Browning has seized and enshrined in verse. But his descriptions are so arranged as to reflect certain moments of crisis in the soul of Sordello. He does not describe this striking landscape for its own sake, but for the sake of his human subject. The lines I quote below describe noon-day on the lagoon, seen from the golden woods and black pines; and the vision of the plain, city and river, suddenly opening out from the wood, symbolises the soul of Sordello opening out from solitude "into the veritable business of mankind."

Then wide Opened the great morass, shot every side With flashing water through and through; a-shine, Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced Athwart the flying herons? He advanced, But warily; though Mincio leaped no more, Each footfall burst up in the marish-floor A diamond jet.

And then he somewhat spoils this excellent thing by a piece of detail too minute for the largeness of the impression. But how clear and how full of true sentiment it is; and how the image of Palma rainbowed in the mist, and of Sordello seeing her, fills the landscape with youthful passion!

Here is the same view in the morning, when Mincio has come down in flood and filled the marsh:

Mincio, in its place, Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face, And, where the mists broke up immense and white I' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light Out of the crashing of a million stars.

It were well to compare that brilliant piece of light with the grey water-sunset at Ferrara in the beginning of Book VI.

While eve slow sank Down the near terrace to the farther bank, And only one spot left from out the night Glimmered upon the river opposite— breadth of watery heaven like a bay, A sky-like space of water, ray for ray, And star for star, one richness where they mixed As this and that wing of an angel, fixed, Tumultuary splendours folded in To die.

As usual, Spring enchants him. The second book begins with her coming, and predicates the coming change in Sordello's soul.

The woods were long austere with snow; at last Pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast Larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes, Brightened, as in the slumbrous heart of the woods Our buried year, a witch, grew young again To placid incantations, and that stain About were from her cauldron, green smoke blent With those black pines.

Nor does he omit in Sordello to recall two other favourite aspects of nature, long since recorded in Pauline, the ravine and the woodland spring. Just as Turner repeated in many pictures of the same place what he had first observed in it, so Browning recalled in various poems the first impressions of his youth. He had a curious love for a ravine with overhanging trees and a thin thread of water, looping itself round rocks. It occurs in the Fireside, it is taken up in his later poems, and up such a ravine Sordello climbs among the pines of Goito:

He climbed with (June at deep) some close ravine Mid clatter of its million pebbles sheen, Over which, singing soft, the runnel slipped Elate with rains.

Then, in Sordello, we come again across the fountain in the grove he draws in Pauline, now greatly improved in clearness and word-brightness—a real vision. Fate has given him here a fount

Of pure loquacious pearl, the soft tree-tent Guards, with its face of reate and sedge, nor fail The silver globules and gold-sparkling grail At bottom—

where the impulse of the water sends up the sand in a cone—a solitary loveliness of Nature that Coleridge and Tennyson have both drawn with a finer pencil than Browning. The other examples of natural description in Sordello, as well as those in Balaustion I shall reserve till I speak of those poems. As to the dramas, they are wholly employed with humanity. In them man's soul has so overmastered Browning that they are scarcely diversified half a dozen times by any illustrations derived from Nature.

We now come, with The Ring and the Book, to a clear division in his poetry of Nature. From this time forth Nature decays in his verse. Man masters it and drives it out. In The Ring and the Book, huge as it is, Nature rarely intrudes; the human passion of the matter is so great that it swallows up all Browning's interest. There is a little forky flashing description of the entrance to the Val d'Ema in Guido's first statement. Caponsacchi is too intensely gathered round the tragedy to use a single illustration from Nature. The only person who does use illustrations from Nature is the only one who is by age, by his life, by the apartness of his high place, capable of sufficient quiet and contemplation to think of Nature at all. This is the Pope.

He illustrates with great vigour the way in which Guido destroyed all the home life which clung about him and himself remained dark and vile, by the burning of a nest-like hut in the Campagna, with all its vines and ivy and flowers; till nothing remains but the blackened walls of the malicious tower round which the hut had been built.

He illustrates the sudden event which, breaking in on Caponsacchi's life, drew out of him his latent power and his inward good, by this vigorous description:

As when a thundrous midnight, with black air That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell, Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides Immensity of sweetness.

And the last illustration, in which the Pope hopes that Guido's soul may yet be saved by the suddenness of his death, is one of the finest pieces of natural description in Browning, and reads like one of his own memories:

I stood at Naples once, a night so dark I could have scarce conjectured there was earth Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: But the night's black was burst through by a blaze— Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, Through her whole length of mountain visible: There lay the city thick and plain with spires, And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.

After The Ring and the Book, poor Nature, as one of Browning's mistresses, was somewhat neglected for a time, and he gave himself up to ugly representations of what was odd or twisted in humanity, to its smaller problems, like that contained in Fifine at the Fair, to its fantastic impulses, its strange madnesses, its basenesses, even its commonplace crimes. These subjects were redeemed by his steady effort to show that underneath these evil developments of human nature lay immortal good; and that a wise tolerance, based on this underlying godlikeness in man, was the true attitude of the soul towards the false and the stupid in mankind. This had been his attitude from the beginning. It differentiates him from Tennyson, who did not maintain that view; and at that point he is a nobler poet than Tennyson.

But he became too much absorbed in the intellectual treatment of these side-issues in human nature. And I think that he was left unprotected from this or not held back from it by his having almost given up Nature in her relation to man as a subject for his poetry. To love that great, solemn and beautiful Creature, who even when she seems most merciless retains her glory and loveliness, keeps us from thinking too much on the lower problems of humanity, on its ignobler movements; holds before us infinite grandeur, infinite beauty, infinite order, and suggests and confirms within us eternal aspiration. Those intimations of the ideal and endless perfectness which are dimmed within us by the meaner aspects of human life, or by the sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual and wealth-seeking society present to us, are restored to us by her quiet, order and beauty. When he wrote Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and The Inn Album, Nature had ceased to awaken the poetic passion in him, and his poetry suffered from the loss. Its interest lies in the narrow realm of intellectual analysis, not in the large realm of tragic or joyous passion. He became the dissector of corrupt bodies, not the creator of living beings.

Nevertheless, in Fifine at the Fair there are several intercalated illustrations from Nature, all of which are interesting and some beautiful. The sunset over Sainte-Marie and the lie Noirmoutier, with the birds who sing to the dead, and the coming of the nightwind and the tide, is as largely wrought as the description of the mountain rill—the "infant of mist and dew," and its voyage to the sea is minute and delicate. There is also that magnificent description of a sunset which I have already quoted. It is drawn to illustrate some remote point in the argument, and is far too magnificent for the thing it illustrates. Yet how few in this long poem, how remote from Browning's heart, are these touches of Nature.

Again, in The Inn Album there is a description of an English elm-tree, as an image of a woman who makes marriage life seem perfect, which is interesting because it is the third, and only the third, reference to English scenery in the multitude of Browning's verses. The first is in Pauline, the second in that poem, "Oh, to be in England," and this is the third. The woman has never ceased to gaze

On the great elm-tree in the open, posed Placidly full in front, smooth hole, broad branch, And leafage, one green plenitude of May. ... bosomful Of lights and shades, murmurs and silences, Sun-warmth, dew-coolness, squirrel, bee, bird, High, higher, highest, till the blue proclaims "Leave Earth, there's nothing better till next step Heavenward!"

This, save in one line, is not felt or expressed with any of that passion which makes what a poet says completely right.

Browning could not stay altogether in this condition, in which, moreover, his humour was also in abeyance; and in his next book, Pacchiarotto, &c., he broke away from these morbid subjects, and, with that recovery, recovered also some of his old love of Nature. The prologue to that book is poetry; and Nature (though he only describes an old stone wall in Italy covered with straying plants) is interwoven with his sorrow and his love. Then, all through the book, even in its most fantastic humour, Nature is not altogether neglected for humanity; and the poetry, which Browning seemed to have lost the power to create, has partly returned to him. That is also the case in La Saisiaz, and I have already spoken of the peculiar elements of the nature-poetry in that work. In the Dramatic Idyls, of which he was himself fond; and in Jocoseria, there is very little natural description. The subjects did not allow of it, but yet Nature sometimes glides in, and when she does, thrills the verse into a higher humanity. In Ferishtah's Fancies, a book full of flying charm, Nature has her proper place, and in the lyrics which close the stories she is not forgotten; but still there is not the care for her which once ran like a full river of delight through his landscape of human nature. He loved, indeed, that landscape of mankind the most, the plains and hills and woods of human life; but when he watered it with the great river of Nature his best work was done. Now, as life grew to a close, that river had too much dried up in his poetry.

It was not that he had not the power to describe Nature if he cared. But he did not care. I have spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and noon and sunset in Gerard de Lairesse in the book which preceded Asolando. They have his trenchant power, words that beat out the scene like strokes on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite unsuffused with human feeling; as if, having once divorced Nature from humanity, he never could bring them together again. Nor is this a mere theory. The Prologue to Asolando supports it.

That sorrowful poem, written, it seems, in the year he died (1889), reveals his position towards Nature when he had lost the power of youth to pour fire on the world. It is full of his last thinking. "The poet's age is sad," he says. "In youth his eye lent to everything in the natural world the colours of his own soul, the rainbow glory of imagination:

And now a flower is just a flower: Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man— Simply themselves, uncinct by dower Of dyes which, when life's day began, Round each in glory ran."

"Ah! what would you have?" he says. "What is the best: things draped in colour, as by a lens, or the naked things themselves? truth ablaze, or falsehood's fancy haze? I choose the first."

It is an old man's effort to make the best of age. For my part, I do not see that the things are the better for losing the colour the soul gives them. The things themselves are indifferent. But as seen by the soul, they are seen in God, and the colour and light which imagination gives them are themselves divine. Nor is their colour or light only in our imagination, but in themselves also, part of the glory and beauty of God. A flower is never only a flower, or a beast a beast. And so Browning would have said in the days when he was still a lover of Nature as well as of man, when he was still a faithful soldier in the army of imagination, a poet more than a philosopher at play. It is a sad business. He has not lost his eagerness to advance, to climb beyond the flaming walls, to find God in his heaven. He has not lost the great hopes with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of old. He has not lost his fighting power, nor his cheerful cry that life is before him in the fulness of the world to come. The Reverie and the Epilogue to Asolando are noble statements of his courage, faith, and joy. There is nothing sad there, nothing to make us beat the breast. But there is sadness in this abandonment of the imaginative glory with which once he clothed the world of Nature; and he ought to have retained it. He would have done so had he not forgotten Nature in anatomising man.