Robert Browning

The gift of the morning-star! Have I God's giftOf the morning-star?

And Luigi will adventure forth—it may be in a kind of divine folly—as a doomsman commissioned by God to free his Italy. The devotion of Luria to Florence is partly of the imagination, and perhaps it is touched with something of illusion. But the actual Florence, with her astute politicians, her spies who spy upon spies, her incurable distrusts, her sinister fears, her ingrained ingratitude, is clearly exposed to him before the end. Shall he turn the army, which is as much his own as the sword he wields, joined with the forces of Pisa, against the beautiful, faithless city? Or will his passionate loyalty endure the test? Luria withdraws from life, but not until he has made every provision for the victory of Florence over her enemy; nor does he die a defeated man; his moral greatness has subdued all envies and all distrusts; at the close everyone is true to him:

The only fault's with time;All men become good creatures: but so slow.29

Once again in Browning's earliest play, the test for the patriot Pym lies in the choice between two loyalties—one to England and to freedom, the other to his early friend and former comrade in politics. His faith in Strafford dies hard; but it dies; he flings forward his hopes for the grand traitor to England beyond the confines of this life, and only the grieved unfaltering justiciary remains. Browning's Pym is a figure neither historically true nor dramatically effective; he is self-conscious and sentimental, a patriot armed in paste-board rhetoric. But the writer, let us remember, was young; this was his first theatrical essay, and he was somewhat showy of fine intentions. The loyalty of Strafford to the King is too fatuous an instinct to gain our complete sympathy. He rides gallantly into the quicksand, knowing it to be such, and the quicksand, as certainly as the worm of Nilus, will do its kind. And yet though this is the vain romance of loyalty, in it, as Browning conceives, lies the test of Strafford. A self-renouncing passion of any kind is not so common that we can afford to look on his king-worship with scorn.

Over against these devotees of the ideal Browning sets his worldlings, ranging from creatures as despicable as the courtiers of Duchess Colombe to such men of power and inexhaustible resource as the Nuncio who confronts Djabal with his Druses, or the Papal Legate whose easier and half-humorous task is to dismiss to his private affairs at Lugo the four-and-twentieth leader of revolt. To the same breed with the courtiers of Colombe belong old Vane and Savile of the court of Charles. To the same breed with the Nuncio and the Legate, belongs Monsignor, who proves himself more than a match for his hireling, the scoundrel Intendant. In a happy moment Monsignor is startled into indignant wrath; he does not exclaim with the Edmund of Shakespeare's tragedy "Some good I mean to do before I die;" but his "Gag the villain!" is a substantial contribution to the justice of our world. Under the ennobling influence of Charles and his Polyxena, the craft of D'Ormea is uplifted to a level of real dignity; if he cannot quite attain the position of a martyr for the truth, he becomes something better than one who serves God at the devil's bidding. And Braccio, plotter and betrayer, yet always with a certain fidelity towards his mother-city, is won over to the side of simple truth and righteousness by the overmastering power of Luria's magnanimity. So precious, after all—Browning would say—is the mere capacity to recognise facts; if only a little grain of virtue remains in the heart, this faculty of vision may make some sudden discovery which shall prove to a worldling that there exist facts, undeniable and of immense potency, hitherto unknown to his philosophy of chicane. Browning's vote is given, as has been said, and with no uncertain voice, for his devotees of the ideal; but the men of fine worldly brain-craft have a fascination for him as they have for his Eastern Luria. In Djabal, at once enthusiast and impostor, Browning may seem, as often afterwards, to offer an apology for the palterer with truth; but in the interests of truth itself, he desires to study the strange phenomenon of the deceiver who would fain half-deceive himself.

Chapter IV

The Maker of Plays—(Continued)

The women of the dramas, with one or two exceptions, are composed of fewer elements than the men. A variety of types is presented, but each personality is somewhat constrained and controlled by its idea; the free movement, the iridescence, the variety in oneness, the incalculable multiplicity in unity, of real character are not always present. They admit of definition to a degree which places them at a distance from the inexplicable open secrets of Shakespeare's creation; they lack the simple mysteriousness, the transparent obscurity of nature. With a master-key the chambers of their souls can one after another be unlocked. Ottima is the carnal passion of womanhood, full-blown, dazzling in the effrontery of sin, yet including the possibility, which Browning conceives as existing at the extreme edge of every expansive ardour, of being translated into a higher form of passion which abolishes all thought of self. Anael, of The Return of the Druses, is pure and measureless devotion. The cry of "Hakeem!" as she falls, is not an act of faith but of love; it pierces through the shadow of the material falsehood to her one illuminated truth of absolute love, like that other falsehood which sanctifies the dying lips of Desdemona. The sin of Mildred is the very innocence of sin, and does not really alter the simplicity of her character; it is only the girlish rapture of giving, with no limitation, whatever may prove a bounty to him whom she loves:—

Come what, come will,You have been happy.

The remorse of Mildred is the remorse of innocence, the anguish of one wholly unlearned in the dark colours of guilt. This tragedy of Mildred and Mertoun is the Romeo and Juliet of Browning's cycle of dramas. But Mildred's cousin Guendolen, by virtue of her swift, womanly penetration and her brave protectiveness of distressed girlhood, is a kinswoman of Beatrice who supported the injured daughter of Leonato in a comedy of Shakespeare which rings with laughter.

Polyxena, the Queen of Sardinia—a daughter not of Italy but of the Rhineland—is, in her degree, an eighteenth century representative of the woman of the ancient Teutonic tribes, grave, resolute, wise, and possessing the authority of wisdom. She, whose heart and brain work bravely together like loyal comrades, is strongly but also simply, conceived as the helpmate, the counsellor, and, in the old sense of the word, the comforter of her husband. Something of almost maternal feeling, as happens at times in real life, mingles with her wifely affection for Charles, who indeed may prove on occasions a fractious son. Like a wise guardian-angel she remembers on these occasions that he is only a man, and that men in their unwisdom may grow impatient of unalleviated guardian-angelhood; he will by and by discover his error, and she can bide her time. Perhaps, like other heroines of Browning, Polyxena is too constantly and uniformly herself; yet, no doubt, it is right that opaline, shifting hues should not disturb our impression of a character whose special virtue is steadfastness. The Queen of the English Charles, who is eager to counsel, and always in her petulance and folly to counsel ill, is slightly sketched; but she may be thanked for one admirable speech—her first—when Strafford, worn and fevered in the royal service, has just arrived from Ireland, and passing out from his interview with the King is encountered by her:—

Is it over then?Why he looks yellower than ever! WellAt least we shall not hear eternallyOf service—services: he's paid at least.

The Lady Carlisle of the same play—a creature in the main of Browning's imagination—had the play been Elizabethan or Jacobean would have followed her lord in a page's dress, have lived on half a smile a day, and perhaps have succeeded in dying languishingly and happily upon his sword; she is not quite unreal, nor yet quite real; something much better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a Beaumont and Fletcher personage of the boards—and as such effective—than a Shakespearian piece of nature. The theatrical limbo to which such almost but not quite embodied shadows ultimately troop, is capacious.

In Browning's dramatic scene of 1853, In a Balcony, he created with unqualified success "a very woman" in the enamoured Queen, whose heart at fifty years beats only more wildly and desperately than a girl's.30 The young lovers, Constance and Norbert, are a highly meritorious pair, who express their passion in excellent and eloquent periods; we have seen their like before, and since. But the Queen, with her unslaked thirst for the visionary wells under the palm-trees, who finds herself still amid the burning sands, is an original and tragic figure—a royal Mlle. de Lespinasse, and crowned with fiery and immitigable pain. Although she has returned the "glare" of Constance with the glare of "a panther," the Queen is large-hearted. The guards, it is true, arrive as the curtain falls; but those readers who have wasted their tender emotion on a couple of afflicted prisoners or decapitated young persons, whom mother Nature can easily replace, are mistaken. If the Queen does not die that night, she will rise next morning after sleepless hours, haggard, not fifty but eighty years old, and her passion will, heroically slay itself in an act of generosity.31 Little more, however, than a situation is represented in this dramatic scene. Of Browning's full-length portraits of women in the dramas, the finest piece of work is the portrait of the happiest woman—the play-Duchess of Juliers, no longer Duchess, but ever

Our lady of dear Ravestein.

Colombe is no incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more of exquisite womanhood to be discovered. Even the too fortunate Valence—all readers of his own sex must pronounce him too fortunate—will for ever be finding her anew.

In the development of his dramatic style Browning more and more lost sight of the theatre and its requirements; his stage became more and more a stage of the mind. Strafford, his first play, is the work of a novice, who has little of the instinct for theatrical effect, but who sets his brain to invent striking tableaux, to prepare surprises, to exhibit impressive attitudes, to calculate—not always successfully—the angle of a speech, so that it may with due impact reach the pit. The opening scene expounds the situation. In the second Wentworth and Pym confront each other; the King surprises them; Wentworth lets fall the hand of Pym, as the stage tradition requires; as Wentworth withdraws the Queen enters to unmake what he has made, and the scene closes with a tableau expressing the sentimental weakness of Charles:

Come, dearest!—look, the little fairy, nowThat cannot reach my shoulder! Dearest, come!

And so proceeds the tragedy, with much that ought to be dear to the average actor, which yet is somehow not always even theatrically happy. The pathos of the closing scene where Strafford is discovered in The Tower, sitting with his children, is theatrical pathos of the most correct kind, and each little speech of little William and little Anne is uttered as much for the audience as for their father, implying in every word "See, how we, poor innocents, heighten the pity of it." The hastily written A Blot in the 'Scutcheon is, perhaps, of Browning's dramas the best fitted for theatrical representation. Yet it is incurably weak in the motives which determine the action; and certain passages are almost ludicrously undramatic. If Romeo before he flung up his ladder of ropes had paused, like Mertoun, to salute his mistress with a tenor morceau from the opera, it is to be feared that runaways' and other eyes would not have winked, and that old Capulet would have come upon the scene in his night-gown, prepared to hasten the catastrophe with a long sword. Yet A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, with its breadth of outline, its striking situations, and its mastery of the elementary passions—love and wrath and pride and pity—gives us assurance that Browning might have taken a place of considerable distinction had he been born in an age of great dramatic poetry. If it is weak in construction so—though in a less degree—are Webster's Duchess of Malfi, and Shakespeare's Cymbeline.

In King Victor and King Charles Browning adopted, and no doubt deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both the characters and the historical subject. The political background of this play and that of Strafford hardly entitles either drama to be named political. Browning was a student of history, but it was individuals and not society that interested him. The affairs of England and the affairs of Sardinia serve to throw out the figures of the chief dramatis persons; those affairs are not considered for their own sake. Certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to form an individual. The Bishop who orders his tomb at St Praxed's is in part a product of the Italian Renaissance, but the causes are seen only in their effects upon the character of a representative person. If the plain, substantial style of King Victor and King Charles is proper to a play with such a hero as Charles and such a heroine as Polyxena, the coloured style, rich in imagery, is no less right in The Return of the Druses, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the enthusiasm of the passion of love. But already Browning was ceasing to bear in mind the conditions of the stage. Certain pages where Djabal and Khalil, Djabal and Anael, Anael and Loys are the speakers, might be described as dialogues conducted by means of "asides," and even the imagination of a reader resents a construction of scenes which requires these duets of soliloquies, these long sequences of the audible-inaudible. With the "very tragical mirth" of the second part of Chiappino's story of moral and political disaster, the spectators and the stage have wholly disappeared from Browning's theatre; the imaginary dialogue is highly dramatic, in one sense of the word, and is admirable in its kind, but we transport ourselves best to the market-place of Faenza by sitting in an easy chair.

Pippa Passes is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread, slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realism in art, as we now call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the seat of God. The idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere fantasy. The magic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the Renaissance men of science named "Magia Naturalis." It is no fantasy but a fact that each of us influences the lives of others more or less every day, and at times in a peculiar degree, in ways of which we are not aware. Let this fact be seized with imaginative intensity, and let the imagination render it into a symbol—we catch sight of Pippa with her songs passing down the grass-paths and under the pine-wood of Asolo. Her only service to God on this one holiday of a toilsome year is to be glad. She misconceives everything that concerns "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones"—to her fancy Ottima is blessed with love, Jules is no victim of an envious trick, Luigi's content in his lot is deep and unassailable, and Monsignor is a holy and beloved priest; and, unawares to her, in modes far other than she had imagined, each of her dreams comes true; even Monsignor for one moment rises into the sacred avenger of God. Her own service, though she knows it not, is more than a mere twelve-hours' gladness; she, the little silk-winder, rays forth the influences of a heart that has the potency ascribed to gems of unflawed purity; and such influences—here embodied in the symbol of a song—are among the precious realities of our life. Nowhere in literature has the virtue of mere innocent gladness been more charmingly imagined than in her morning outbreak of expectancy, half animal glee, half spiritual joy; the "whole sunrise, not to be suppressed" is a limitless splendour, but the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not Pippa her one martagon lily, over which she queens it? With God all service ranks the same, and she shall serve Him all this long day by gaiety and gratitude.

Pippa Passes is a sequence of dramatic scenes, with lyrics interspersed, and placed in a lyrical setting; the figures dark or bright, of the painting are "ringed by a flowery bowery angel-brood" of song. But before his Bells and Pomegranates were brought to a close Browning had discovered in the short monodrama, lyrical or reflective, the most appropriate vehicle for his powers of passion and of thought. Here a single situation sufficed; characters were seen rightly in position; the action of the piece was wholly internal; a passion could be isolated, and could be either traced through its varying moods or seized in its moment of culmination; the casuistry of the brain could be studied apart,—it might have its say uninterrupted, or it might be suddenly encountered and dissipated by some spearlike beam of light from the heart or soul; the traditions of a great literary form were not here a cause of embarrassment; they need not, as in work for the theatre, be laboriously observed or injuriously violated; the poet might assert his independence and be wholly original.

And original, in the best sense of the word—entirely true to his highest self—Browning was in the "Dramatic Lyrics" of 1842, and the "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics" of 1845. His senses were at once singularly keen and energetic, and singularly capacious of delight; his eyes were active instruments of observation, and at the same time were possessed by a kind of rapture in form—and not least in fantastic form—and a rapture still finer in the opulence and variety of colour. In these poems we are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit. Having returned from his first visit to southern Italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience, still attack the eye and ear as he writes his Englishman in Italy, and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the appropriate word.32 The fisherman from Amalfi pitches down his basket before us,

All trembling aliveWith pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit,—You touch the strange lumps,And mouths gape there, eyes open, all mannerOf horns and of humps.

Or it is the "quick rustle-down of the quail-nets," or the "whistling pelt" of the olives, when Scirocco is loose, that invades our ears. And by and by among the mountains the play of the senses expands, and the soul has its great word to utter:

God's own profoundWas above me, and round me the mountains,And under, the sea,And within me, my heart to bear witnesshat 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 beesOn 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 leapIn fiery ringlets from their sleepAs 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.