Robert Browning. Edward Dowden
expands, and the soul has its great word to utter:
God's own profound
Was above me, and round me the mountains,
And under, the sea,
And within me, my heart to bear witness
hat was and shall be.
Not less vivid is the vision of the light craft with its lateen sail outside Triest, in which Waring—the Flying Englishman—is seen "with great grass hat and kerchief black," looking up for a moment, showing his "kingly throat," till suddenly in the sunset splendour the boat veers weather-ward and goes off, as with a bound, "into the rose and golden half of the sky." And what animal-painter has given more of the leonine wrath in mane and tail and fixed wide eyes than Browning has conveyed into his lion of King Francis with three strokes of the brush? Or it is only a bee upon a sunflower on which the gazer's eye is fixed, and we get the word of Rudel:
And therefore bask the bees
On my flower's breast, as on a platform broad.
Or—a grief to booklovers!—the same eye is occupied by all the grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking in the plum tree's crevice of Browning's Garden Fancy, which creeps and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.33 Or it is night and moonlight by the sandy shore, and for a moment—before love enters—all the mind of the impressionist artist lives merely in the eye:
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep
As I gain the cove with pushing prow.
If Browning did not rejoice in perfect health and animal spirits—and in the letters to Miss Barrett we hear of frequent headaches and find a reference to his pale thin face as seen in a mirror—he had certainly the imagination of perfect vitality and of those "wild joys of living," sung by the young harper David in that poem of Saul, which appeared as a fragment in the Bells and Pomegranates, and as a whole ten years later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture of the senses.34
Of these poems of 1842 and 1845 one The Pied Piper, was written in the spirit of mere play and was included in Bells and Pomegranates only to make up a number, for which the printer required more copy. One or two—the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of France and Hungary, Claret and Tokay, are no more than clever caprices of the fancy. One, The Lost Lender, remotely suggested by the conservatism of Wordsworth's elder days, but possibly deflected by some of the feeling attributed to Pym in relation to Strafford of the drama, and certainly detached from direct personal reference to Wordsworth, expresses Browning's liberal sentiment in politics. One, the stately Artemis Prologuizes, is the sole remaining fragment of a classical drama, "Hippolytus and Aricia," composed in 1840, "much against my endeavour," wrote the poet,—a somewhat enigmatical phrase—"while in bed with a fever." A considerable number of the poems may be grouped together as expressions or demonstrations of various passions, central among which is the passion of love. A few, and these conspicuous for their masterly handling of novel themes, treat of art, and the feeling for art as seen in the painter of pictures or in the connoisseur. Nor is the interpretation of religious emotion—though in a phase that may be called abnormal—wholly forgotten.
With every passion that expands the spirit beyond the bounds of self, Browning, as the dramas have made evident to us, is in cordial sympathy. The reckless loyalty, with its animal spirits and its dash of grief, the bitterer because grief must be dismissed, of the Cavalier Tunes, is true to England and to the time in its heartiness and gallant bluffness. The leap-up of pride and joy in a boy's heart at the moment of death in his Emperor's cause could hardly be more intensely imagined than it is in the poem of the French camp, and all is made more real and vivid by the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in presence of a death so devoted. And side by side with this poem of generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy—the Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister; a grotesque insect, spitting ineffectual poison, is placed under the magnifying-glass of the comic spirit, and is discovered to be—a brother in religion! A noble hatred, transcending personal considerations, mingles with a noble and solemn love—the passion of country—in the Italian exile's record of his escape from Austrian pursuers; with the clear-obscure of his patriotic melancholy mingles the proud recollection of the Italian woman who was his saviour, over whose conjectured happiness as peasant wife and peasant mother the exile bows with a tender joy. The examples of abnormal passion are two—that of the amorous homicide who would set on one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in Porphyria's Lover, and that of the other occupier of the mad-house cells, Johannes Agricola, whose passion of religion is pushed to the extreme of a mystical antinomianism.
Browning's poems of the love of man and woman are seldom a simple lyrical cry, but they are not on this account the less true in their presentment of that curious masquer and disguiser—Love. When love takes possession of a nature which is complex, affluents and tributaries from many and various faculties run into the main stream. With Browning the passion is indeed a regal power, but intellect, imagination, fancy are its office-bearers for a time; then in a moment it resumes all authority into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is complex into the singleness of joy or pain, fuses all that is manifold into the unity of its own life and being. His dramatic method requires that each single faculty should be seen in the environment of a character, and that its operations should be clothed more or less in circumstance. And since love has its ingenuities, its fine-spun and far-flung threads of association, its occult symbolisms, Browning knows how to press into the service of the central emotion objects and incidents and imagery which may seem remote or curious or fantastic or trivial or even grotesque. In Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli love which cometh by the hearing of the ear (for Rudel is a sun-worshipper who has never seen his sun) is a pure imaginative devotion to the ideal. In Count Gismond love is the deliverer; the motive of the poem is essentially that of the Perseus and Andromeda myth refined upon and mediaevalised. In Cristine love is the interpreter of life; a moment of high passion explains, and explains away, all else that would obscure the vision of what is best and most real in this our world and in the worlds that are yet unattained. From a few lines written to illustrate a Venetian picture by Maclise In a Gondola was evolved. If Browning was not entirely accurate in his topography of Venice, he certainly did not fail in his sense of the depth and opulence of its colour. Here the abandonment to passion is relieved by the quaint ingenuities and fancies of love that seeks a momentary refuge from its own excess, and then returns more eagerly upon itself; and the shadow of death is ever at hand, but like the shadows of a Venetian painter it glows with colour.
The motives of two narrative poems, The Glove and The Flight of the Duchess, have much in common; they lie in the contrast between the world of convention and the world of reality. In each the insulter of proprieties, the breaker of bounds is a woman; in each the choice lies between a life of pretended love and vain dignities and a life of freedom and true love; and in each case the woman makes her glad escape from what is false to what is true. In restating the incident of the glove Browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here used to justify a passion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation. The Flight of the Duchess in part took its rise "from a line, 'Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!'—the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy, heard a woman singing on a Guy Fawkes' day." Some two hundred lines were given to Hood for his magazine, at a time when Hood needed help, and death was approaching him. The poem was completed some months later. It is written, like The Glove, in verse that runs for swiftness' sake, and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like rhymes. The little Duchess is a wild bird caged in the strangely twisted wirework of artificial modes and forms. She is a prisoner who is starved for real life,
See a very interesting passage on Browning's "odd liking for 'vermin'" in
Of the first part of