Quel
homme extraordinaire !
homme extraordinaire !
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v13
In 1846, the
series entitled Bells and Pomegranates was brought to an end,
and Browning's period of playwriting closed with Luria and the
dramatic sketch A Soul's Tragedy.
At this time, also, the first period of Browning's amazing
productiveness came to a close. The poems that appeared cannot
even be classified except in the roughest way, and any classification
must mislead. The familiar distinctions which criticism sets up
fade and become false. There are lyrical effects in most of the
dramas, dramatic touches in almost every lyric and romance, and
his muse will not be demure and prim. On the other hand, the
variety of the subjects, forms, moods, scenes and passions, and of
the workings of each of them, baffles classification. And each is
so 'clear proclaimed '—whether ‘Hope rose a-tiptoe,' or ‘Rapture
drooped the eyes,' or 'Confidence lit swift the forehead up'—that
the distinctions, if they are to be faithful, must be as numerous as
the poems themselves. In truth, it is not art but science, not love
but knowledge, which classifies. So far as poems are true works
of art, each one is, and must be, unique—a carved golden cup
filled with its own wine. For the artist, every song in turn is
i By Herford.
6
6
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The Dramatic Element
63
>
6
1
The poems
the one song, and, for the lover, every tress of hair, in turn, ‘is
the fairest tress of all. '
Browning himself, however, suggests two points of view from
which the poems may be observed. He characterises them all as
'dramatic. ' How far is this qualification accurate? Was Brown-
ing's genius verily dramatic in character? The question is not
easily answered, even although it can be profitably asked. In
comparison with Wordsworth, who was both the most self-
contained and the most impersonal of all our poets, we must
answer the question with a clear affirmative. But, compared with
Shakespeare, or with Sir Walter Scott (as novelist), the difference
is so great as to make the epithet 'dramatic' positively misleading.
Of not one of Shakespeare's creations can we say 'Here is the
author himself'; of scarcely one of Browning's can we say 'Here
the author is not. ' Browning, in writing to Elizabeth Barrett,
called the poems ‘Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light
of a revolving lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow
chink. ' The analogy is true in more than one sense.
carry suggestions of the abundance of riches within the poet's own
living, alert, enterprising, sense-fraught, passion-fused soul; the
motley throng of his Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances and
Dramatis Personae also stand in the brilliant glare of his person-
ality-not in the unobtrusive, quiet light of common day. There
is hardly a stratum of society, an age of history, a corner of the
world of man, which is altogether absent from these poems;
nevertheless, we never escape the sense of the author's powerful
presence. In all the diversities of type, race and character, there
are persistent qualities, and they are the poet's own.
There is no quality of Shakespeare's mind which can be found
in all his plays, except, perhaps, his gentleness ; even as only the
one epithet 'gentle' satisfies when we speak of Shakespeare him-
self. But 'gentleness' is just tolerance suffused with kindliness ;
and, where tolerance is perfect, preferences disappear, and the
poet himself remains always revealing and never revealed.
To deny tolerance to Browning is impossible, and would utterly
destroy his claim to be dramatic. There is a real sense in which he
stands aloof from his creations, neither approving nor disapproving
but letting them go. Bishop Blougram and Mr Sludge ; Caliban
and the bishop of St Praxed's; the lady of The Laboratory and
of The Confessional; the lion of The Glove with those eyes wide
and steady,'
leagues in the desert already,
Driving the flocks up the mountain,
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
and the live creatures in Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis—'worm,
slug, eft, with serious features,' tickling and tousing and brows-
ing him all over-all these are given a place in the sun, no
less than his Valence or Caponsacchi, Colombe or Constance. It
were unpardonable in a critic not to recognise that, for Browning,
there was no form which the human soul could take that was too
strange, complex, monstrous, magnificent, commonplace and drab,
in its hate or love or in any other passion, to be interesting in the
artistic and purely impersonal sense. All the same, his tolerant
universality is not like Shakespeare's in quality. There are, in
Browning, no characters whom we must condemn and, also, must
approve; whom we cannot justify and would not miss, but like
beyond all speech or sense. There is no Jack Falstaff, nor even
a Dogberry, or Bottom, or Launce, far less a Touchstone. There
is no Bob Acres, even, or Sir Anthony Absolute.
Browning will persist in appealing to our reason. It is always
a question of what accepts or refuses to accept its control. Morality,
at rare moments, is allowed to see to itself, and the beautiful and
ugly stand justified or condemned in their own right. But truth
always matters to him, and his intellectualising propensities never
rest. The play of fancy is rarely quite irresponsible, and of humour
more rarely still. There is no touch in Browning of the singing
rogue Autolycus. Some of his lyrics, no doubt, are as light as
they are lovely; and The Pied Piper is by no means the only
first-rate example of joyous story-telling. Nevertheless, Browning,
many as are the parts he plays, is not like Bottom-he cannot
aggravate his voice and roar us gently. He is never splendidly
absurd, nor free of every purpose. Even at this period, he is
plagued with problems, crammed with knowledge, crowded with
mental energy, a revolving lighthouse bursting with light. In a
word, he is intense and purposive, and his purposiveness and
intensity had many consequences, not all of them favourable to
his dramatic work. A brief study of these is illuminative of his
whole work as a poet.
‘Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing that's spirit,' he said,
in Pacchiarotto. He laid stress on the incidents in the develop-
ment of a soul,' he tells us, in his preface to Sordello, ‘little else
is worth study. This was more than a fundamental idea to
Browning, it was a constitutional propensity; and it drove him to
the drama. But the confession of it implies the consciousness of
a mission, and the artist, at his best, knows no mission of that
kind. He is in the service of no conception that the intellect can
## p. 65 (#81) ##############################################
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The Dramatic Element
65
shape or express, or of no purpose that the will can frame and fix.
His rapture is as fine and careless as that of the thrush, and he
is snatched up and away by themes that define themselves only in
the process of creation and, in the end, escape all definition and
stand forth as miracles. But this absence of purpose we do not
often find in Browning. His dramatic pieces are not at leisure;
the poet himself never strolls, but is always set upon some business.
even among his Garden Fancies.
For the same reason, there are no genuine little incidents in
Browning's plays. Little things are apt to be symbolic-pin-point
rays of intense light coming from afar are imprisoned in them: they
suggest grave meanings: possibly, for instance, the failure of the
whole life, through making love, at some moment, a merely second-
best.
Why did not you pinch a flower
In a pellet of clay and fling it?
Why did not I put a power
Of thanks in a look, or sing it ? 1
The whole atmosphere of the plays is heavily charged with
significance; and many characters, in consequence, are, from be-
ginning to end, in some highly-strung mood. There is tragic
tension in the very first words that Mildred speaks: 'Sit, Henry-
do not take my hand. ' The moral strain deepens with the next
question, and it is never relaxed. No breath of fresh air from the
unheeding outer world comes to break the spell, and, at the same
time, to deepen, by contrast, the pathos and tragedy of Mildred's
overmastering consciousness that she does not deserve, and will
never hold in her arms, the happiness that seemed to stand
close by.
It is, probably, this preliminary, purposive surcharging of the
characters and incidents that led Dowden to say that
the dramatic genius of Browning was in the main of the static kind; it studies
with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in position; it attains only
an imperfect or laboured success with character in movement.
As it stands, this dictum is unsound. Restless energy is always
straining against the poet's control. His genius is dramatic, pre-
cisely in virtue of the sense of movement which it conveys, and
the feeling that life is process and nothing else, a continuous new
creation of itself carried on by itself. Even in The Ring and the
Book, where the poet not only knows but tells the end at the
beginning, the dramatic quality of movement is present. The
story expands at each telling, like circles in water. The facts are
1 Youth and Art.
E. L. XIII.
CH. III.
5
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
transformed with each successive telling of them, by one and the
other Half-Rome, Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, The Pope and the
lawyers. Not for a moment does the story stand still, nor does the
reader feel that he is being told of past events, as in listening to
an essentially epic poet, like Milton. Browning's poems are never
stagnant: tragedy never hangs overhead, as in Hamlet, a black,
motionless, delayed thunder-cloud; but the lightning is always
ablaze. There are crowded happenings, and the heat and hurry
of situations crashing into their consequences. Browning's genius
is essentially dynamic, and there is abundant movement.
What Browning's characters lack is objectivity--if we may
borrow a term from the philosophers. Such is the intensity of
his interest in the incidents in the development of a soul' that it
transfuses not only the dramatis personae but the world in which
they live. The outer world is not genuinely outer. It does not
exist for its own sake, carrying on its own processes, 'going on
just the same,' whether men and women laugh or weep, live or die,
utterly indifferent to every fate, distinguishing not in the least
between great things and small, evil things and good, allowing
'both the proudly riding and the foundering bark. ' It is not
a world aloof from man, non-moral and, on surface reading,
non-rational, the sphere of sheer caprice and the playground of
accident. The world is the stage and background for Browning's
characters and supplies the scenery they need.
What is done by his personages, therefore, is not the result of
intercourse between human character and what, in itself, is an
entirely natural world. And, consequently, what takes place lacks
that appearance of contingency in collusion with necessity of which
the true dramatist makes tragic use. When he is most completely
under the spell of his muse, the true dramatist cannot tell before-
hand what will happen to his men and women, or how they will
behave. He is at the mercy of two unknowns: the inexhaustible
possibilities of man's nature, and of the response which it will
make to the never-ending contingencies of an indifferent outer
world. He has no preconceived theory, no scheme of life, no
uniformities or necessities which can be labelled : the unity of his
work, as a work of art, has some more mystic source than any of
these things. But we cannot quite say this of Browning. His
men and women cannot be called embodiments of à priori con-
ceptions, meant to illustrate a doctrine or point a moral; and, yet,
their intercourse with their fellows and interaction with the world
have no genuinely fashioning potency. Nothing quite new or quite
1
1
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The Dramatic Element
67
unexpected ever happens to them. They are not in a world where
unexpected things are permitted to happen. Had not Macbeth
happened to meet the witches on the moor, with the excitement
of the battle not yet subsided in his blood, he might have lived
and died a loyal and victorious general. And what side-winds of
mere accidents there are in Othello and Hamlet! These dramas
are like life, because the fate which is irresistible comes clothed in
accident and with its chaplet all awry and as careless as that of
a Bacchic dancer. The accidents seem trivial, too, and might
easily not have taken place or have been turned aside, until they
have taken place. Then, and not till then, do we feel that they
were meant, and that they were as inevitable as destiny.
But Browning's plays can be seen from afar to march straight-
forward to their consummation; and the world in which they take
place is all too obtrusively 'a moral order. ' The personages are,
from the first, inwardly charged with some dominant passion or
propensity. They are dedicated, even when they are complex, to
some one form of good or of evil; and some one misdeed stains
the whole of life like ink in water. They are enveloped in their
own atmosphere, and outer incidents cannot affect their career;
carried along by the powers within as if by a driving storm;
freighted full from the first with their destiny: Pym with his love
of England; Mildred with the guilt of her innocence; Luria with
his own East'; Tresham with the pride of family and the
'scutcheon without a blot; Valence with his stormy rectitude
and great heart.
This is the only sense in which Browning's dramas lack move-
ment, and his method may be called static. His characters
are impervious to outward influence, except in so far as it serves
to discharge what is already within. Within the inner realm of
passions, emotions, volitions, ambitions, and the world which
these catch up in their career, there is no lack of movement.
A plenitude of powers all active are revealed by him: they co-
operate, sever, mingle, collide, combine, and are all astrain-but
they are all psychical. Browning places us in the parliament of
the mind. It is the powers of mind to which we listen in high
debate. And we are reminded by them of the fugues of Master
Hugues of Saxe-Gotha:
One dissertates, he is candid;
Two must discept-has distinguished;
Three helps the couple, if ever yet man did;
Four protests; Five makes a dart at the thing wished :
Back to One, goes the case bandied.
5-2
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
And they require scope to declare themselves, as they reveal the
wonder-world of the human soul.
Now, we have stated these points somewhat fully because
they seem to throw light upon the whole of Browning's work as
a poet. The tendency towards dwelling upon ideal issues rather
than upon outer deeds, on the significance of facts for souls, and
the insignificance of all things save in the soul's context, was
always present in Browning; so, also, was the tendency towards
monologue, with its deliberate, ordered persistency. And both
of these tendencies grew. External circumstance became, more
and more, the mere garb of the inner mood; deeds, more and
more, the creatures of thoughts; and all real values were more and
more, undisguisedly ideal ministrants to man's need of beauty,
or goodness, or love and happiness.
But to say this is to admit not only that the dramatic element
in his poetry was on the wane, but that his poetry was itself
becoming more deliberately reflective. And the spirit of reflection
which rejects first appearances, sublimates sense and its experience
into meanings, is, to say the least, as characteristic of philosophy as
it is of art. It is philosophy rather than art which concentrates
upon principles, and which allows facts and events to dwindle into
instances of general laws. Art must value a thing for what it is
in itself, not for the truth which it exemplifies. The reference of
the beautiful object beyond itself to a beauty that is eternal must
be, for art, as undesigned as the music of a harp swung in the
wind. And, when a poet takes to illustrating themes, or the unity
of his poems, instead of being a mystic harmony of elements
mingling of themselves, comes of a set purpose which can be stated
in words, then, indeed, is the glory of art passing into the grey.
The poet outlived the dramatist in Browning, and, if the poet did not
succumb to the philosopher, it was because of the strength of the
purely lyrical element in his soul and the marvellous wealth of his
sensuous and emotional endowments. His humanity was too richly
veined for him to become an abstract thinker; and certain appa-
rent accidents of his outer life conspired with the tendencies of
his poetic genius to lead them away from the regular drama.
One of these was his quarrel over A Blot in the 'Scutcheon with
Macready, for whom and at whose request this play was written.
But Macready's affairs were entangled; he would withdraw from his
arrangement with Browning, was not frank with him, but shuffled:
and Browning was angered, imperious and explosive. The play
was produced but 'damned,' apparently not by the audience but
## p. 69 (#85) ##############################################
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Quarrels about Plays
by Macready's own stage and press arrangements. The Times
pronounced it one of the most faulty dramas we ever beheld,'
and The Athenaeum called it ‘a puzzling and unpleasant business,'
and the characters inscrutable and abhorrent. This was in 1843.
The quarrel with Macready was not the poet's only unpleasant
experience of the stage. Soon after this incident, Charles Kean
negotiated with Browning for a suitable play, and, in March 1844,
Colombe's Birthday was read to him and approved. But Kean
asked that it should be left with him, unpublished, till the Easter
of the following year. Browning, however, thought the long delay
unreasonable, was, possibly, doubtful of the actor's good faith and
resolved to publish the play at once. It was not acted till 1853,
when it was produced by Phelps with Helen Faucit as heroine
and ran for a fortnight. But it was reviewed on publication by
Forster-who said that he abominated the tastes of Browning as
much as he respected his genius. Forster repented, called on
Browning and was 'very profuse of graciocities'; but their friend-
ship had received a fatal injury. Browning concluded that there
was too much ‘spangle' and 'smutch' in connection with actors,
and wrote no more for the stage.
During the years 1844–5, Browning made a series of contri-
butions to Hood's Magazine. The series included The Flight of
the Duchess and The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's
Church. The poet, having gone to Italy in 1844, and having visited
the grave of Shelley, had turned into the little church of Saint
Prassede near Santa Maria Maggiore.
Returning to England before the end of the year, he read
Elizabeth Barrett's newly published Poems. They contained Lady
Geraldine's Courtship, in which he found his work mentioned with
that of Tennyson and of Wordsworth, and a reference to his own
'beart blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity. Elizabeth Barrett
'
had previously, in a series of articles on English poets in The
Athenaeum, placed Browning among 'high and gifted spirits ’;
and he had approved of her first series of articles on the
early Greek Christian poets. Moreover, each knew of the
other through Kenyon, Elizabeth Barrett's second cousin, school-
fellow of Browning's father and the special providence of both
Robert Browning and his wife. Kenyon encouraged Browning
to express to Elizabeth Barrett his admiration of her poems.
The poet wrote to her with the unrestrained freedom of his
most magnanimous character, telling her that he loved her
verses with all his heart'; and his letter the letter of the
a
## p. 70 (#86) ##############################################
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[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
6
author of Paracelsus and king of the mystics,' 'threw her into
ecstasies. ' They became intimate through a correspondence which
was at first dictated by mood and opportunity, and, afterwards, in
accordance with formal 'contract. On 20 May 1845, after the
lapse of a winter and a spring, Browning came and saw her for
the first time, a little figure, which did not rise from the sofa,
pale ringleted face, great, eager, wistful eyes,' and, as Elizabeth
Barrett said, 'he never went away again. ' His declaration of
love followed, prompt and decisive as a thunder-clap. It was
countered with a refusal that was absolute, but all for his sake,
and followed by the triumph of a masterful passion and will
which could not be put aside. '
The circumstances are too remarkable, and meant too much for
both the poets not to require a brief recounting.
Elizabeth Barrett was born at Coxhoe hall,' Durham, on
6 March 1806, the eldest of the eleven children of Edward Moulton
Barrett, a West Indian planter. When she was still an infant,
the family moved to Hope End, Herefordshire, the place with
which the early memories recorded in Aurora Leigh, The Lost
Bower and other poems are associated. Until she was about
fifteen years of age, she was healthy and vigorous, although ‘slight
and sensitive'; and she was a good horsewoman. But, either in
endeavouring to saddle her pony for herself, or in riding, she
injured her spine ; and the hurt was the occasion, if not the cause,
of her being treated as an incurable invalid by her father—so long
as she was under his roof.
From Hope End, the family removed first to Sidmouth, after-
wards to 74 Gloucester place, and, finally, to Wimpole street,
London, where Browning first came to see her. The marriage
took place on 12 September 1846; and, a week later, they were
on the way to Italy, where they made their permanent home in
Casa Guidi, Florence.
The Battle of Marathon, Elizabeth Barrett's juvenile poem,
was followed, in 1826, by An Essay on Mind and other Poems,
a volume which bears in the very title the stamp of Pope, though
its authoress, then and always, was quite unqualified to imitate his
terse neatness. Then, in 1833, came Prometheus Bound, a trans-
lation from Aeschylus, with which the translator herself came to
be so thoroughly dissatisfied that she suppressed it, so far as
she was able, and substituted for it a second translation, which
was published in 1850, in the same volume as Sonnets from the
Portuguese. The Seraphim and other Poems was published in
## p. 71 (#87) ##############################################
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Mrs Browning
71
1838, and, finally, in 1844, the two volumes of Poems. No poet
ever had less of the Greek spirit of measure and proportion,
though she was widely read in Greek literature and delighted in
its fair forms. Nor was anyone more unlike Pope. Her work,
in fact, was as chaotic and confused as it was luxurious and
improvident. Her Seraphim is overstrained and misty; her
Drama of Exile is an uninteresting allegory; nearly all her
shorter poems are too long, for she did not know how to omit,
or when to stop. Few, if any, poets have sinned more grievously
or frequently against the laws of metre and rime.
It was natural and inevitable that the influence of her love
for Browning should transfigure her poetry as well as transform
her life. In consequence of it, there is one work (and possibly one
only) whose quality is unique, and whose worth is permanent,
and not easily computed. This is her Sonnets from the Portuguese,
They had been composed by her during the period of the courtship.
Browning knew of them for the first time when, ‘one morning,
early in 1847, Mrs Browning stole quietly after breakfast into the
room where her husband worked, thrust some manuscript into his
pocket, and then hastily withdrew! An amazing revelation even
to him they must have been of the seraphic intensity of her love.
The form of the sonnet had helped Elizabeth Barrett (as it helped
Wordsworth at times) to avoid her besetting sins. Extravagance
and diffuseness are not so possible under its rigid rules. On the
other hand, the intoxication of her passion helped to secure her
against the flatness of the commonplace. They were first privately
printed as Sonnets by E. B. B. , and, three years later, published
under their present title. These forty-four sonnets, unequal as they
are, make Elizabeth Browning's title to fame secure and go some
way towards explaining, if not also justifying, the esteem of her
contemporaries for her poetry. She was deemed the greatest of
English poetesses, perhaps rightly; her name was also suggested
(with Tennyson's but without her husband's) for the poet laureate-
ship on the death of Wordsworth. In March 1849, the Brownings'
only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett, was born, and, shortly
afterwards, Robert Browning's mother died, leaving him long
depressed. The summers of 1851 and 1852 were spent in England.
In the former year, on their return journey to Italy, they travelled
as far as Paris with Carlyle. There, among other celebrities,
they met George Sand, and, also, Joseph Milsand, who had recently
written of Browning in La Revue des Deux Mondes. Milsand's
1 The Life of Robert Browning by Griffin and Minchin.
## p. 72 (#88) ##############################################
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
friendship was one of the most precious in Browning's life.
Quel
homme extraordinaire ! he is reported to have said of the poet,
son centre n'est pas au milieu. The winter of 1853—4 was spent,
by way of variety, at Rome. Of the numerous journeyings from
Florence during the remaining years, it is only necessary to record
that, in the summer of 1855, the two poets carried to England
the MS of Men and Women and great part of that of Aurora
Leigh. Browning completed his volume by the addition of One
Word More, which is dated London, September 1855. During
this visit, Tennyson, in the house of Browning, read aloud his
Maud and Browning read Fra Lippo Lippi, while Dante Rossetti
listened and sketched him— Tennyson, according to W. M. Rossetti,
‘mouthing out his hollow o’s and a’s,' while Browning's voice laid
stress on all the light and shade of character, its conversational
points, its dramatic give and take. They joined Kenyon at West
Cowes, and Elizabeth Browning wrote the last pages of Aurora
Leigh under his roof and dedicated the poem to him.
On their return to Florence, they received news of the imme-
diate and very great success of the poem; and Browning, whose
Men and Women failed either to attract the public or to please the
critics, rejoiced with a great joy in her triumph.
While the Brownings were in England, Daniel D. Home, the
most notorious of American exponents of spiritualism, held a
séance at which they were present. A wreath that happened
to be on the table was raised by “spirit' hands and placed on
Elizabeth Browning's brow—the medium's own feet operating
also, Browning maintained. Home subsequently visited Florence;
and spiritualistic manifestations became for Elizabeth Browning
and some of her friends a matter of profoundly serious interest,
and for Browning himself an intolerable irritant. Nothing that
Browning wrote surpasses Mr Sludge, The Medium' in dramatic
power. It exposes more powerfully even than Blougram and
Juan and Hohenstiel-Schwangau that corruption of the soul
by a lying and selfish life which infects its whole world, making
of it a twilight region in which truth and error, right and wrong
are inextricably confused, and nothing said is either sincere or
insincere. Sludge, at least in some respects, is the greatest of
Browning's magnificent casuists, who themselves are new figures
in poetic literature: and, no doubt, it owes something of its vigour
to his distasteful experience of Home. But Home was not
the subject of the poem. Sludge the medium is as universal
and impersonal a creation as Falstaff; and, though Browning
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Mrs Browning
73
'stamped on the floor in a frenzy of rage at the way some believers
and mediums deceived Mrs Browning,' he allows Sludge to be
himself and to have his own say in so impartial a way as to
make the poem a striking revelation of the strength of the
poet's dramatic genius.
In 1859, Elizabeth Browning fell alarmingly ill : political
events-the war, the armistice and conference at Villafranca
and Napoleon's bargain excited her too much. Browning nursed
her, and took charge, also, of his son's lessons. To these, he
added the charge of the affairs of Landor, and of Landor himself
-a most difficult and delicate task. Landor had quarrelled in his
volcanic way with his family, with whom he lived at Fiesole, and
appeared homeless, penniless and with nothing but the clothes
he stood in at Casa Guidi. Browning took him into his house,
arranged and managed his affairs for him, and was loving and
tolerant with that wide generosity of spirit which made friends
of men of the most untoward temperament. Landor loved
Browning, and was tame under his hand, while Browning
amused Elizabeth by talking of Landor's 'gentleness and sweet-
ness. '
Notwithstanding the transformation' which her marriage was
said to have wrought, Elizabeth Browning's health was never com-
pletely restored, or secure-'I have never seen a human frame so
nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit,' said
Hillard of her, when he saw her in Florence. During these years,
her strength gradually waned, and on 29 June 1861, suddenly,
without any presentiment on her part or fear on his, she passed
away. Her death, it is supposed, was hastened by that of Cavour
on the sixth of the same month. She had said of him, 'if tears or
blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine. ' She
was buried in Florence, and a tablet on the walls of Casa Guidi
expresses the gratitude of the city for her advocacy of Italian
freedom. Browning's sorrow was as deep as his life; but it was
borne in his manly fashion. In order to live and work and
write,' he had 'to break up everything and go to England. ' He
never returned to Florence, nor did he visit Italy again until
1878.
Although they lived at first in happy seclusion, 'soundless and
stirless hermits,' as Elizabeth Browning said, still, no one followed
with fuller sympathy the changing fortunes of Italy. But Browning
sang neither its hopes nor its sorrows— Nationality was not an
effectual motive with him’-nor did its contemporary politics mean
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [[
CH.
so much for him as a poet as its medieval art. But it was other-
wise with his wife. She responded to what was present. Even the
art of which we hear in her letters is not the art of the Vatican or
the Capitol, but Story's, or Gibson's, or Page’s. She was profoundly
moved by the agitation for freedom. Italy was the land where she
herself first knew freedom, and her emotions swept her into song.
Of the four publications of her later life, two are entirely Italian in
theme-Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems before Congress
(1860). And both are political.
It was a time of revolution when the Brownings settled in
Italy, and the ferment continued throughout the whole period of
their married life. Casa Guidi Windows dealt with the earlier
phases of the movement for liberation. In its later stages, the
part taken in it by Napoleon III and the equivocal character
of his motives and actions were matter of intense interest to
them. Elizabeth Browning was his devoted defender; Browning
was alternately critical and condemnatory. Even the annexation
of Savoy and Nice' only momentarily shook her faith in him.
Browning summed up the situation by saying of Napoleon's part
in the Italian war that it was a great action but he has taken
eighteen pence for it, which is a pity. They had agreed to write
of Napoleon and publish jointly. Elizabeth Browning's labours
resulted in Poems before Congress; on the annexation, Browning
dropped the project and destroyed what he had written. But he
came back to the subject, during that period when it delighted
him most to explore the intricacies of ambiguous souls whose
morality was 'pied' and intellects casuistical; and he produced
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.
Both Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress illustrate
the difficulty of lifting contemporary politics into poetry. Neither
these nor the aftermath in her posthumous Last Poems (1862)
have added to Elizabeth Browning's literary reputation.
It remains to notice the longest and the most ambitious of
her poems--Aurora Leigh, with its eleven thousand lines of
blank verse. It was the literary venture on which she staked
her fortune; in her dedication of it to Kenyon, she calls it 'the
most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest
convictions upon Life and Art have entered. ' The readers of
her time agreed with her; critics were unanimous, and their
praise was pitched high; the first edition was exhausted in a
fortnight, and a third was required within a few months.
Later readers have become much more temperate. It is a novel
## p. 75 (#91) ##############################################
6
11] Robert Browning's Italian Period
75
in iambic decasyllables. The story is a thin thread on which are
strung the opinions of the writer on all manner of matters-
educational, social, artistic, ethical.
Elizabeth Browning's gifts were lyrical. She was essentially
a subjective poet, in the sense that the events she described and
the characters she drew were saturated with her own sympathies.
All the characters in Aurora Leigh are entirely subordinate to
the heroine, and the heroine, however little Elizabeth Browning
intended it, is the unsubstantial shadow of herself. She had no
dramatic or narrative genius. The world in which her characters
move is always created on the pattern of her own inner life,
for she dipped her brush in her own emotions. Her later poems
show some improvement in technique, and some of them are
enriched by her life in Italy and by the influence of her husband,
which was very great: for it is not Pippa Passes only which
counts for something in Aurora Leigh, nor even Paracelsus,
whose faith is paraphrased in hundreds of its lines. But they
contain nothing equal to Rhyme of the Duchess May, Cowper's
Grave and The Cry of the Children. If she is remembered
permanently, it will be, as a poet, by reason of the expression
she gave to a mother's love in A Child's Grave at Florence,
and, even more securely, by the sublime passion of the love
of wife for husband in Sonnets from the Portuguese.
The Italian period of Browning's life was comparatively barren.
It has been suggested that this was due, in part, to the fact that the
climate of Italy lowered his vitality; in part, to the unpopularity
of his works. Moreover, he took to drawing, and to modelling in
clay, copying masterpieces with intense pleasure. Only two publi-
cations of verse marked this period—Christmas Eve and Easter
Day (1850) and Men and Women (1855). He also wrote at this
time an essay on Shelley, by way of introduction to Certain Letters
of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1852), which were afterwards found to be
fabrications. The essay was evidently influenced by Milsand's
article on Browning himself, in La Revue des Deux Mondes. It
accentuates in the same way the distinction between subjective
and objective poetry, and discusses Shelley's work with much skill
and insight.
In Christmas Eve and Easter Day, critics discover clear
evidence of the influence of Elizabeth Browning's devout Christian
faith. Browning had been interested in religion all his life: for
the atheism' which he caught from Shelley was as superficial and
temporary as the vegetarianism. Pauline, Paracelsus, Pippa
## p. 76 (#92) ##############################################
76
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
Passes, all the principal poems of the early period bear witness to
his sense of the profound significance of religion. Christmas Eve
deals with contemporary attitudes towards Christianity-dissent,
the higher criticism, Roman catholicism-with a characteristic
preference for the first. Easter Day is more restrained and stern,
more full of lyric beauty and more searching in its truth. It deals
with the inner nature of the faith that is religious-religious and
not epicurean or materialistic-not seeking its evidences in out-
ward happenings or its worth in the complacency which it
brings, the zest it gives to joy, or the bitterness it takes away from
sorrow. Both poems are dramatic; neither is to be regarded as
the poet's confession of faith; nevertheless, they express the pro-
foundest of his spiritual convictions, which centred upon the most
sublime of all religious hypotheses, namely, that of the omnipotence
and omnipresence of a Christlike God, the divine power and work
of love. Saul, especially the second part, which contains the
prophecy of Christianity, Cleon, Karshish, bear witness to the
same conceptions--the omnipresent wonder that transcends defini-
tion, and is yet the sole sure light whereby man can walk and find
safe footing.
Elizabeth Browning's influence may be detected, also, in the
poems which treat of love. The original Dramatic Lyrics (the
Dramatic Lyrics as they stood before the poems transferred thereto
from Men and Women) included Cristina and in a Gondola, and
among Dramatic Romances and Lyrics there appeared The
Lost Mistress. But the collection which included A Woman's Last
Word, Any Wife to Any Husband, The Last Ride Together, One
Way of Love, among many more, was certainly a richer rendering of
the marvel of love than any of his previous works. It is probable
that no single poet, in any country, so rendered the variety of its
phases and the abundance of its power-its triumph, its failure;
its victory over the world, its defeat by the world; its passion and
poignancy; its psychical subtlety and its romance, and the im-
mensity of its spiritual significance, whether in the life of the soul
or in the outer cosmos.
Many of the poems in Men and Women of which the scene can
be determined have reference to Italy. But it is doubtful whether
his residence in Italy influenced Browning's choice of subjects to
any great extent. “He was deeply Italianised before he went to
live in Italy. To say nothing of Sordello and Pippa Passes, there
'
was an Italian group in the original Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics, which is almost as conspicuous as that of the original Men
## p. 77 (#93) ##############################################
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Dramatis Personae
77
and Women. After The Ring and the Book, Italian subjects
become both more rare and less important.
On leaving Italy, Browning settled in London. With the
change of residence came a change of habit. His Italian life,
quiet in the early years, had become gradually much more social.
In Florence, in Rome and during their visits to London, the charm
of Elizabeth Browning, and Robert Browning's own genius for
noble friendship, brought them into intimate relations with the
most gifted of their time. After her death, until the spring of
1863, he retired within himself, and his life, as he said, was ‘as
grey as the London sky. ' Then, he thought that way of life
morbid and unworthy, resolved to accept every suitable invitation
and, thenceforth, his figure was familiar in the circles of the lovers
of literature, although, except for a very few friends, all women,
none ever saw of Browning more than 'a splendid surface. '
In 1863, he was much agitated by a proposal to publish a life
of Elizabeth Browning, with letters. He turned savagely upon the
blackguards' who would 'thrust their paws into his bowels,' and
he destroyed the greater part of his own correspondence. But he
preserved the letters that had passed between himself and his
wife prior to their marriage ; with the result that hardly anyone,
except, perhaps, Carlyle, protested more strongly against the
intrusion of spies into his life's intimacies, and had the inner
shrine more ruthlessly laid bare. He, however, freely gave to the
public what had been intended for them. He republished Elizabeth
Browning's prose essays on the Greek Christian poets and the
English poets in 1863; and, two years later, made a selection from
her poems, and expressed his delight at the popularity which made
it necessary.
For three years in succession, he spent the summer months at
Ste Marie, near Pornic, where he worked at his Dramatis Personae,
published in 1864. Part of 1866 and 1867 was spent at Croisic, the
name of which is linked with The Two Poets of Croisic, as he
linked that of Pornic with Gold Hair, Red Cotton Night-Cap
Country and the gipsy woman of Fifine at the Fair.
Browning was at the height of his power during this period.
Nowhere is his poetic work so uniformly great as in Dramatis
Personae (1864); and there is no doubt that The Ring and the
Book is the most magnificent of all his achievements, in spite of
its inequalities. Critics miss in Dramatis Personae something of
the lightness and brightness and early morning charm of Pippa
Passes and of some of his earlier Men and Women; and they find
## p. 78 (#94) ##############################################
78
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
6
in it, not any trace of the pathetic fallacy, yet a lingering echo of
the brooding sorrow for his life's loss. It was later in the day, the
world was more commonplace; the outlook more desolate and
man's failure less tinged with glory; women were more homely,
love was less ethereal; and the stuff to be idealised through being
better known by a wiser love was more stubborn. "The summer
had stopped,' and 'the sky was deranged. ' But the autumn had
come, bringing a richer harvest in Dramatis Personae. The
significance of man's life, and of the clash of circumstance which
elicited it, was deeper as well as more grave. The world's worn
look disappears when it is seen in the great context in which it
stands—All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall
exist,' says Abt Vogler. Man has himself 'a flash of the will that
can,' for he can use its distraught elements of life to a moral
purpose, and weld them in a spiritual harmony-out of three
sounds make, 'not a fourth sound, but a star. ' Prospice, Rabbi
Ben Ezra, A Death in the Desert, even Mr Sludge, 'The Medium'
and Caliban upon Setebos, are strong with a controlled ethical
passion for what is real and true as things stand, and by interest
in the issues which are ultimate ; and, with this realism, natural
and spiritual, in both kinds, there is blended an imaginative
splendour which transfigures even the least of all mankind,'
when we 'look at his head and heart'; and
see what I tell you-nature dance
About each man of us, retire, advance,
As though the pageant's end were to enhance
His worth, and-once the life, his product, gained-
Roll away elsewhere.
It is a permanent theme, its echoes are to be heard all the way to
A solando—this wash of circumstance around man's soul which yet
maintains its mastery over all the play of the waves; and nowhere
is it rendered more finely than in Dramatis Personae and its
Epilogue.
The Edinburgh Review found it a 'subject of amazement
that poems of so obscure and uninviting a character should find
numerous readers’; and there were other critics besides Frederick
Tennyson who still thought Browning's poetry 'the most grotesque
conceivable. ' But the situation had, in truth, changed. Browning's
admirers were no longer confined to pre-Raphaelites and young
men at the Universities. A second edition of Dramatis Personae
was called for within the same year as the first. And the reception
accorded to The Ring and the Book was still more favourable.
6
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11]
The Ring and the Book
79
At last, Browning was coming into his kingdom. It had taken
long: so late as 1867, he spoke of himself as 'the most unpopular
poet that ever was. '
There was an interval of four years between Dramatis Per-
sonae and The Ring and the Book. But the theme had interested
him from the moment when he came upon the 'old, square, yellow
book' on an old bookstall in Florence—the parchment-bound tale
of the trial of an Italian noble for the murder of his wife. He
saw its dramatic possibilities when he stood on the balcony of
Casa Guidi, in June 1860, at night, watching the storm. But it lay
long working in his mind, and the sorrow of the following year
led him to abandon the idea of writing, and he suggested the
subject to two of his friends. In September 1862, he recurred
to it, spoke of 'my new poem that is about to be,''the Roman
murder story. He began to write it about 1864, and the poem grew
steadily, for it became his crowning venture and he gave it regularly
every day 'three quiet, early morning hours. ' It was published
in four volumes, the first of which appeared in November 1868;
and the others during the three months following.
Many things concurred to make the story attractive to
Browning. He had inherited a taste for tales of crime from
his father; the situation was ambiguous and, as regards the priest
and the girl-wife, it left room for a most beautiful, as well as for a
sordid, explanation, and, therefore, it appealed both to Browning's
love of argument and to his ethical idealism ; moreover, opinion
in Rome was divided, and the popular mind was on its trial; there
was the possibility that the truth told for once for the church,
and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil'; and the
story, in its essence, was not a common drab, but glorious—the
romance of the young priest and Pompilia was 'a gift of God, who
showed for once how he would have the world go white. '
It was inevitable that such a theme should set free all the
powers of Browning's spirit; but it borrowed sublimity and a
sacred loveliness from another quarter. For, undoubtedly, the
poem which enshrined Pompilia was instinct with reminiscence. '
With all its abounding vitality it was yet commemorative and
memorial? ' When he wrote of 'the one prize vouchsafed unworthy
me’; of 'the one blossom that made me proud at eve’; of a 'life
companioned by the woman there'; of living and seeing her learn,
and learning by her, can there be doubt as to who lent to these
utterances their pathetic beauty?
1 Herford.
ature
UM
10
R
1
1
.
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80 Robert and Elizabeth Browning [
[CH.
6
6
Nor is it fanciful to find in Caponsacchi something of the poet
himself-more, perhaps, than in any other character he created.
There was his own tempestuousness, much that a wise old pope
could find 'amiss,' 'blameworthy,' 'ungainly,' 'discordant,' 'in-
fringement manifold' of convention ; but there was also a
“symmetric soul within,' 'championship of God at first blush,
'prompt, cheery thud of glove on ground,' answering ‘ringingly
the challenge of the false knight. ' What are these qualities, with
the ardour of a great love and the headlong and utter devotion
of a large-hearted manhood, except the poet's own ? Capon-
sacchi's
I am, on earth, as good as out of it,
A relegated priest; when exile ends,
I mean to do my duty and live long,
is inspired by the manly recoil of Browning and bis refusal
to be crushed by his sorrow. But the dream of having his 'lyric
Love' by his side has been broken ; and the bereaved poet is
not perceptible in the 'drudging student,' who 'trims his lamp,
draws the patched gown close' and awakes 'to the old solitary
nothingness. ' The last words are a promise of this priest to
'pass content, from such communion’; and Browning would fain
have come back into the world of men as if his wound had
healed. But the truth breaks out-
O great, just, good God! Miserable me!
There was, for both priest and poet, the rule in the world
of a love that wrapped all things round about, and yet, some-
how, also, there were sorrows that knew neither shores nor
shoals.
To pass all the parts of this great poem under review is not
possible, and to estimate the relative poetic worth of its several
parts—Caponsacchi, Pompilia, The Pope and Guido—is not
necessary; there are kinds as well as degrees of perfection, and
comparison is sometimes absurd. The possibility of justifying the
structure of the poem as a whole will remain doubtful; and the
maccaronic speeches of the lawyers, and some parts of what
Rome said, have no real artistic value. But the poem is unique
in its excellence as well as in its defects.
During the six years which followed The Ring and the Book,
Browning wrote nothing but long poems—with the exception
of Hervé Riel, which was published for a charitable purpose.
Balaustion's Adventure appeared in 1871. Balaustion had the
## p. 81 (#97) ##############################################
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111] Transcripts from Euripides
81
Alcestis of Euripides by heart, and, by rendering that 'strangest,
saddest, sweetest song,' saves her own life and wins for the ship
refuge in the harbour of Syracuse. Balaustion's character has the
charm of Pippa; Hercules, re-created by Browning, is magnificent
—with the gay cheer' of his great voice, heralding gladness as
he helped the world, the human and divine, i'' the weary, happy
face of him, half god, half man, which made the god-part god the
more (a favourite and recurrent conception). In Aristophanes'
Apology, Balaustion is reintroduced, and we have a second
transcript from Euripides—and, with it, above all else, the in-
comparable portrait of Aristophanes. “No ignoble presence':
‘mind a-wantoning,' it is true, but at ease,' all the same, 'of
undisputed mastery over the body's brood, those appetites. '
A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship.
The transcribed portions of both poems have only secondary
value; and the translation is said to be often tame, literal and
even awkward. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877) is said to
be an even less acceptable rendering : 'exact' and unintelligible.
It was undertaken on the suggestion of Carlyle and dedicated to
him. One would like to know what mood Carlyle was in, when
he gave his advice, telling Browning 'ye ought to translate the
whole of the Greek tragedians-that's your vocation. Browning
was better left to sport in his own way, in his own element, like
his ‘King of Pride,' 'through deep to deep,''churning the blackness
hoary. ' There is ample evidence of his wide, intimate knowledge
of the literature of Athens, and of his love of its methods; but
his strength was not similar to that of the Greeks; and he cannot
be said to have made a significant contribution either to the
knowledge or to the love, in England, of the Greek drama.
As if Browning were under compulsion to squander the
popularity gained by Dramatis Personae and The Ring and the
Book, and with both hands, there appeared, besides these Greek
poems, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair
(1872), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country or Turf and Towers
(1873) and The Inn Album (1875). Either for its theme, or for
the treatment of it, or for both theme and treatment, every one
of these poems failed to please. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,
a monologue over a cigar, illustrated by connecting blot with blot
on a 'soiled bit' of paper, is the mean and tortuous plea of a
weak, possibly well-meaning, certainly discredited, politician. Its
hero, Napoleon III, was hardly great enough to be tragical,
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [ch.
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6
or even picturesque. Fifine at the Fair shocked and alienated
good people. It was supposed to be a defence of illicit love; and
its style was thought as turgid as its morality was false. Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country is a novel in verse; the story of a
Paris jeweller and his mistress. It has been defended on the
ground that, as a strong treatment of the ugly, it makes the ugly
uglier! More sanely it has been disapproved as 'versified special
correspondence,'' from which every pretence of poetry is usually
remote. ' The Inn Album once more deals with illicit passion, and,
once more, is 'a novel in verse. ' Its hero is all tinsel, and 'rag
and feather sham,' irredeemably mean, smart and shallow, a cheat
at cards, growing old amid his 'scandalous successes'—a figure,
one might say, better let be by the poet. The heroine, the
betrayed girl, is a genuinely tragical figure. And the tragedy is
final, remorseless ; for she marries a parish priest who is unloving
and unloved, dull, elderly, poor, conscientious, whom she ‘used
to pity' till she learned what woes are pity-worth. Him, in an
ugly, filthy village, sterile as if' sown with salt,' she helps to drug
and dose his flock with the doctrine of heaven and hell—the latter
'made explicit. Much of this poem is powerful ; it contains
one passage strangely Shakespearean in quality : that in which
the elder lady describes her lost love, when its reality was
questioned by her betrayer. As a whole, however, it cannot
compare with Fifine at the Fair, either in range of reflective
power, or in wealth of artistic splendour, or in the weight of the
issues which are called forth. It was not without reason that
Browning spoke of Fifine as the most metaphysical and boldest
he had written since Sordello”; and not in all respects was
Swinburne's dictum wrong—' This is far better than anything
Browning has yet written. ' Its main defect is that in it, even
more than usual, ‘Browning has presumed too much upon his
reader's insight' and taken no pains to 'obviate confusions he
would have held to be impossible had they occurred to his mind. '
His experience of his critics— the inability of the human goose
to do other than either cackle or hiss'-led him to banter them in
Pacchiarotto and how he worked in Distemper (1876), which tells
the whimsical tale of the artist who tried to reform his fellows. The
poem is genial and boisterous and, in its rime, brilliant and absurd;
an instance of another of the poet's ways of Aristophanic wantoning.
series entitled Bells and Pomegranates was brought to an end,
and Browning's period of playwriting closed with Luria and the
dramatic sketch A Soul's Tragedy.
At this time, also, the first period of Browning's amazing
productiveness came to a close. The poems that appeared cannot
even be classified except in the roughest way, and any classification
must mislead. The familiar distinctions which criticism sets up
fade and become false. There are lyrical effects in most of the
dramas, dramatic touches in almost every lyric and romance, and
his muse will not be demure and prim. On the other hand, the
variety of the subjects, forms, moods, scenes and passions, and of
the workings of each of them, baffles classification. And each is
so 'clear proclaimed '—whether ‘Hope rose a-tiptoe,' or ‘Rapture
drooped the eyes,' or 'Confidence lit swift the forehead up'—that
the distinctions, if they are to be faithful, must be as numerous as
the poems themselves. In truth, it is not art but science, not love
but knowledge, which classifies. So far as poems are true works
of art, each one is, and must be, unique—a carved golden cup
filled with its own wine. For the artist, every song in turn is
i By Herford.
6
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## p. 63 (#79) ##############################################
] III
The Dramatic Element
63
>
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1
The poems
the one song, and, for the lover, every tress of hair, in turn, ‘is
the fairest tress of all. '
Browning himself, however, suggests two points of view from
which the poems may be observed. He characterises them all as
'dramatic. ' How far is this qualification accurate? Was Brown-
ing's genius verily dramatic in character? The question is not
easily answered, even although it can be profitably asked. In
comparison with Wordsworth, who was both the most self-
contained and the most impersonal of all our poets, we must
answer the question with a clear affirmative. But, compared with
Shakespeare, or with Sir Walter Scott (as novelist), the difference
is so great as to make the epithet 'dramatic' positively misleading.
Of not one of Shakespeare's creations can we say 'Here is the
author himself'; of scarcely one of Browning's can we say 'Here
the author is not. ' Browning, in writing to Elizabeth Barrett,
called the poems ‘Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light
of a revolving lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow
chink. ' The analogy is true in more than one sense.
carry suggestions of the abundance of riches within the poet's own
living, alert, enterprising, sense-fraught, passion-fused soul; the
motley throng of his Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances and
Dramatis Personae also stand in the brilliant glare of his person-
ality-not in the unobtrusive, quiet light of common day. There
is hardly a stratum of society, an age of history, a corner of the
world of man, which is altogether absent from these poems;
nevertheless, we never escape the sense of the author's powerful
presence. In all the diversities of type, race and character, there
are persistent qualities, and they are the poet's own.
There is no quality of Shakespeare's mind which can be found
in all his plays, except, perhaps, his gentleness ; even as only the
one epithet 'gentle' satisfies when we speak of Shakespeare him-
self. But 'gentleness' is just tolerance suffused with kindliness ;
and, where tolerance is perfect, preferences disappear, and the
poet himself remains always revealing and never revealed.
To deny tolerance to Browning is impossible, and would utterly
destroy his claim to be dramatic. There is a real sense in which he
stands aloof from his creations, neither approving nor disapproving
but letting them go. Bishop Blougram and Mr Sludge ; Caliban
and the bishop of St Praxed's; the lady of The Laboratory and
of The Confessional; the lion of The Glove with those eyes wide
and steady,'
leagues in the desert already,
Driving the flocks up the mountain,
6
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64
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
and the live creatures in Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis—'worm,
slug, eft, with serious features,' tickling and tousing and brows-
ing him all over-all these are given a place in the sun, no
less than his Valence or Caponsacchi, Colombe or Constance. It
were unpardonable in a critic not to recognise that, for Browning,
there was no form which the human soul could take that was too
strange, complex, monstrous, magnificent, commonplace and drab,
in its hate or love or in any other passion, to be interesting in the
artistic and purely impersonal sense. All the same, his tolerant
universality is not like Shakespeare's in quality. There are, in
Browning, no characters whom we must condemn and, also, must
approve; whom we cannot justify and would not miss, but like
beyond all speech or sense. There is no Jack Falstaff, nor even
a Dogberry, or Bottom, or Launce, far less a Touchstone. There
is no Bob Acres, even, or Sir Anthony Absolute.
Browning will persist in appealing to our reason. It is always
a question of what accepts or refuses to accept its control. Morality,
at rare moments, is allowed to see to itself, and the beautiful and
ugly stand justified or condemned in their own right. But truth
always matters to him, and his intellectualising propensities never
rest. The play of fancy is rarely quite irresponsible, and of humour
more rarely still. There is no touch in Browning of the singing
rogue Autolycus. Some of his lyrics, no doubt, are as light as
they are lovely; and The Pied Piper is by no means the only
first-rate example of joyous story-telling. Nevertheless, Browning,
many as are the parts he plays, is not like Bottom-he cannot
aggravate his voice and roar us gently. He is never splendidly
absurd, nor free of every purpose. Even at this period, he is
plagued with problems, crammed with knowledge, crowded with
mental energy, a revolving lighthouse bursting with light. In a
word, he is intense and purposive, and his purposiveness and
intensity had many consequences, not all of them favourable to
his dramatic work. A brief study of these is illuminative of his
whole work as a poet.
‘Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing that's spirit,' he said,
in Pacchiarotto. He laid stress on the incidents in the develop-
ment of a soul,' he tells us, in his preface to Sordello, ‘little else
is worth study. This was more than a fundamental idea to
Browning, it was a constitutional propensity; and it drove him to
the drama. But the confession of it implies the consciousness of
a mission, and the artist, at his best, knows no mission of that
kind. He is in the service of no conception that the intellect can
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The Dramatic Element
65
shape or express, or of no purpose that the will can frame and fix.
His rapture is as fine and careless as that of the thrush, and he
is snatched up and away by themes that define themselves only in
the process of creation and, in the end, escape all definition and
stand forth as miracles. But this absence of purpose we do not
often find in Browning. His dramatic pieces are not at leisure;
the poet himself never strolls, but is always set upon some business.
even among his Garden Fancies.
For the same reason, there are no genuine little incidents in
Browning's plays. Little things are apt to be symbolic-pin-point
rays of intense light coming from afar are imprisoned in them: they
suggest grave meanings: possibly, for instance, the failure of the
whole life, through making love, at some moment, a merely second-
best.
Why did not you pinch a flower
In a pellet of clay and fling it?
Why did not I put a power
Of thanks in a look, or sing it ? 1
The whole atmosphere of the plays is heavily charged with
significance; and many characters, in consequence, are, from be-
ginning to end, in some highly-strung mood. There is tragic
tension in the very first words that Mildred speaks: 'Sit, Henry-
do not take my hand. ' The moral strain deepens with the next
question, and it is never relaxed. No breath of fresh air from the
unheeding outer world comes to break the spell, and, at the same
time, to deepen, by contrast, the pathos and tragedy of Mildred's
overmastering consciousness that she does not deserve, and will
never hold in her arms, the happiness that seemed to stand
close by.
It is, probably, this preliminary, purposive surcharging of the
characters and incidents that led Dowden to say that
the dramatic genius of Browning was in the main of the static kind; it studies
with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in position; it attains only
an imperfect or laboured success with character in movement.
As it stands, this dictum is unsound. Restless energy is always
straining against the poet's control. His genius is dramatic, pre-
cisely in virtue of the sense of movement which it conveys, and
the feeling that life is process and nothing else, a continuous new
creation of itself carried on by itself. Even in The Ring and the
Book, where the poet not only knows but tells the end at the
beginning, the dramatic quality of movement is present. The
story expands at each telling, like circles in water. The facts are
1 Youth and Art.
E. L. XIII.
CH. III.
5
## p. 66 (#82) ##############################################
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
transformed with each successive telling of them, by one and the
other Half-Rome, Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, The Pope and the
lawyers. Not for a moment does the story stand still, nor does the
reader feel that he is being told of past events, as in listening to
an essentially epic poet, like Milton. Browning's poems are never
stagnant: tragedy never hangs overhead, as in Hamlet, a black,
motionless, delayed thunder-cloud; but the lightning is always
ablaze. There are crowded happenings, and the heat and hurry
of situations crashing into their consequences. Browning's genius
is essentially dynamic, and there is abundant movement.
What Browning's characters lack is objectivity--if we may
borrow a term from the philosophers. Such is the intensity of
his interest in the incidents in the development of a soul' that it
transfuses not only the dramatis personae but the world in which
they live. The outer world is not genuinely outer. It does not
exist for its own sake, carrying on its own processes, 'going on
just the same,' whether men and women laugh or weep, live or die,
utterly indifferent to every fate, distinguishing not in the least
between great things and small, evil things and good, allowing
'both the proudly riding and the foundering bark. ' It is not
a world aloof from man, non-moral and, on surface reading,
non-rational, the sphere of sheer caprice and the playground of
accident. The world is the stage and background for Browning's
characters and supplies the scenery they need.
What is done by his personages, therefore, is not the result of
intercourse between human character and what, in itself, is an
entirely natural world. And, consequently, what takes place lacks
that appearance of contingency in collusion with necessity of which
the true dramatist makes tragic use. When he is most completely
under the spell of his muse, the true dramatist cannot tell before-
hand what will happen to his men and women, or how they will
behave. He is at the mercy of two unknowns: the inexhaustible
possibilities of man's nature, and of the response which it will
make to the never-ending contingencies of an indifferent outer
world. He has no preconceived theory, no scheme of life, no
uniformities or necessities which can be labelled : the unity of his
work, as a work of art, has some more mystic source than any of
these things. But we cannot quite say this of Browning. His
men and women cannot be called embodiments of à priori con-
ceptions, meant to illustrate a doctrine or point a moral; and, yet,
their intercourse with their fellows and interaction with the world
have no genuinely fashioning potency. Nothing quite new or quite
1
1
## p. 67 (#83) ##############################################
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The Dramatic Element
67
unexpected ever happens to them. They are not in a world where
unexpected things are permitted to happen. Had not Macbeth
happened to meet the witches on the moor, with the excitement
of the battle not yet subsided in his blood, he might have lived
and died a loyal and victorious general. And what side-winds of
mere accidents there are in Othello and Hamlet! These dramas
are like life, because the fate which is irresistible comes clothed in
accident and with its chaplet all awry and as careless as that of
a Bacchic dancer. The accidents seem trivial, too, and might
easily not have taken place or have been turned aside, until they
have taken place. Then, and not till then, do we feel that they
were meant, and that they were as inevitable as destiny.
But Browning's plays can be seen from afar to march straight-
forward to their consummation; and the world in which they take
place is all too obtrusively 'a moral order. ' The personages are,
from the first, inwardly charged with some dominant passion or
propensity. They are dedicated, even when they are complex, to
some one form of good or of evil; and some one misdeed stains
the whole of life like ink in water. They are enveloped in their
own atmosphere, and outer incidents cannot affect their career;
carried along by the powers within as if by a driving storm;
freighted full from the first with their destiny: Pym with his love
of England; Mildred with the guilt of her innocence; Luria with
his own East'; Tresham with the pride of family and the
'scutcheon without a blot; Valence with his stormy rectitude
and great heart.
This is the only sense in which Browning's dramas lack move-
ment, and his method may be called static. His characters
are impervious to outward influence, except in so far as it serves
to discharge what is already within. Within the inner realm of
passions, emotions, volitions, ambitions, and the world which
these catch up in their career, there is no lack of movement.
A plenitude of powers all active are revealed by him: they co-
operate, sever, mingle, collide, combine, and are all astrain-but
they are all psychical. Browning places us in the parliament of
the mind. It is the powers of mind to which we listen in high
debate. And we are reminded by them of the fugues of Master
Hugues of Saxe-Gotha:
One dissertates, he is candid;
Two must discept-has distinguished;
Three helps the couple, if ever yet man did;
Four protests; Five makes a dart at the thing wished :
Back to One, goes the case bandied.
5-2
## p. 68 (#84) ##############################################
68
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
And they require scope to declare themselves, as they reveal the
wonder-world of the human soul.
Now, we have stated these points somewhat fully because
they seem to throw light upon the whole of Browning's work as
a poet. The tendency towards dwelling upon ideal issues rather
than upon outer deeds, on the significance of facts for souls, and
the insignificance of all things save in the soul's context, was
always present in Browning; so, also, was the tendency towards
monologue, with its deliberate, ordered persistency. And both
of these tendencies grew. External circumstance became, more
and more, the mere garb of the inner mood; deeds, more and
more, the creatures of thoughts; and all real values were more and
more, undisguisedly ideal ministrants to man's need of beauty,
or goodness, or love and happiness.
But to say this is to admit not only that the dramatic element
in his poetry was on the wane, but that his poetry was itself
becoming more deliberately reflective. And the spirit of reflection
which rejects first appearances, sublimates sense and its experience
into meanings, is, to say the least, as characteristic of philosophy as
it is of art. It is philosophy rather than art which concentrates
upon principles, and which allows facts and events to dwindle into
instances of general laws. Art must value a thing for what it is
in itself, not for the truth which it exemplifies. The reference of
the beautiful object beyond itself to a beauty that is eternal must
be, for art, as undesigned as the music of a harp swung in the
wind. And, when a poet takes to illustrating themes, or the unity
of his poems, instead of being a mystic harmony of elements
mingling of themselves, comes of a set purpose which can be stated
in words, then, indeed, is the glory of art passing into the grey.
The poet outlived the dramatist in Browning, and, if the poet did not
succumb to the philosopher, it was because of the strength of the
purely lyrical element in his soul and the marvellous wealth of his
sensuous and emotional endowments. His humanity was too richly
veined for him to become an abstract thinker; and certain appa-
rent accidents of his outer life conspired with the tendencies of
his poetic genius to lead them away from the regular drama.
One of these was his quarrel over A Blot in the 'Scutcheon with
Macready, for whom and at whose request this play was written.
But Macready's affairs were entangled; he would withdraw from his
arrangement with Browning, was not frank with him, but shuffled:
and Browning was angered, imperious and explosive. The play
was produced but 'damned,' apparently not by the audience but
## p. 69 (#85) ##############################################
69
111]
Quarrels about Plays
by Macready's own stage and press arrangements. The Times
pronounced it one of the most faulty dramas we ever beheld,'
and The Athenaeum called it ‘a puzzling and unpleasant business,'
and the characters inscrutable and abhorrent. This was in 1843.
The quarrel with Macready was not the poet's only unpleasant
experience of the stage. Soon after this incident, Charles Kean
negotiated with Browning for a suitable play, and, in March 1844,
Colombe's Birthday was read to him and approved. But Kean
asked that it should be left with him, unpublished, till the Easter
of the following year. Browning, however, thought the long delay
unreasonable, was, possibly, doubtful of the actor's good faith and
resolved to publish the play at once. It was not acted till 1853,
when it was produced by Phelps with Helen Faucit as heroine
and ran for a fortnight. But it was reviewed on publication by
Forster-who said that he abominated the tastes of Browning as
much as he respected his genius. Forster repented, called on
Browning and was 'very profuse of graciocities'; but their friend-
ship had received a fatal injury. Browning concluded that there
was too much ‘spangle' and 'smutch' in connection with actors,
and wrote no more for the stage.
During the years 1844–5, Browning made a series of contri-
butions to Hood's Magazine. The series included The Flight of
the Duchess and The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's
Church. The poet, having gone to Italy in 1844, and having visited
the grave of Shelley, had turned into the little church of Saint
Prassede near Santa Maria Maggiore.
Returning to England before the end of the year, he read
Elizabeth Barrett's newly published Poems. They contained Lady
Geraldine's Courtship, in which he found his work mentioned with
that of Tennyson and of Wordsworth, and a reference to his own
'beart blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity. Elizabeth Barrett
'
had previously, in a series of articles on English poets in The
Athenaeum, placed Browning among 'high and gifted spirits ’;
and he had approved of her first series of articles on the
early Greek Christian poets. Moreover, each knew of the
other through Kenyon, Elizabeth Barrett's second cousin, school-
fellow of Browning's father and the special providence of both
Robert Browning and his wife. Kenyon encouraged Browning
to express to Elizabeth Barrett his admiration of her poems.
The poet wrote to her with the unrestrained freedom of his
most magnanimous character, telling her that he loved her
verses with all his heart'; and his letter the letter of the
a
## p. 70 (#86) ##############################################
70
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
6
author of Paracelsus and king of the mystics,' 'threw her into
ecstasies. ' They became intimate through a correspondence which
was at first dictated by mood and opportunity, and, afterwards, in
accordance with formal 'contract. On 20 May 1845, after the
lapse of a winter and a spring, Browning came and saw her for
the first time, a little figure, which did not rise from the sofa,
pale ringleted face, great, eager, wistful eyes,' and, as Elizabeth
Barrett said, 'he never went away again. ' His declaration of
love followed, prompt and decisive as a thunder-clap. It was
countered with a refusal that was absolute, but all for his sake,
and followed by the triumph of a masterful passion and will
which could not be put aside. '
The circumstances are too remarkable, and meant too much for
both the poets not to require a brief recounting.
Elizabeth Barrett was born at Coxhoe hall,' Durham, on
6 March 1806, the eldest of the eleven children of Edward Moulton
Barrett, a West Indian planter. When she was still an infant,
the family moved to Hope End, Herefordshire, the place with
which the early memories recorded in Aurora Leigh, The Lost
Bower and other poems are associated. Until she was about
fifteen years of age, she was healthy and vigorous, although ‘slight
and sensitive'; and she was a good horsewoman. But, either in
endeavouring to saddle her pony for herself, or in riding, she
injured her spine ; and the hurt was the occasion, if not the cause,
of her being treated as an incurable invalid by her father—so long
as she was under his roof.
From Hope End, the family removed first to Sidmouth, after-
wards to 74 Gloucester place, and, finally, to Wimpole street,
London, where Browning first came to see her. The marriage
took place on 12 September 1846; and, a week later, they were
on the way to Italy, where they made their permanent home in
Casa Guidi, Florence.
The Battle of Marathon, Elizabeth Barrett's juvenile poem,
was followed, in 1826, by An Essay on Mind and other Poems,
a volume which bears in the very title the stamp of Pope, though
its authoress, then and always, was quite unqualified to imitate his
terse neatness. Then, in 1833, came Prometheus Bound, a trans-
lation from Aeschylus, with which the translator herself came to
be so thoroughly dissatisfied that she suppressed it, so far as
she was able, and substituted for it a second translation, which
was published in 1850, in the same volume as Sonnets from the
Portuguese. The Seraphim and other Poems was published in
## p. 71 (#87) ##############################################
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Mrs Browning
71
1838, and, finally, in 1844, the two volumes of Poems. No poet
ever had less of the Greek spirit of measure and proportion,
though she was widely read in Greek literature and delighted in
its fair forms. Nor was anyone more unlike Pope. Her work,
in fact, was as chaotic and confused as it was luxurious and
improvident. Her Seraphim is overstrained and misty; her
Drama of Exile is an uninteresting allegory; nearly all her
shorter poems are too long, for she did not know how to omit,
or when to stop. Few, if any, poets have sinned more grievously
or frequently against the laws of metre and rime.
It was natural and inevitable that the influence of her love
for Browning should transfigure her poetry as well as transform
her life. In consequence of it, there is one work (and possibly one
only) whose quality is unique, and whose worth is permanent,
and not easily computed. This is her Sonnets from the Portuguese,
They had been composed by her during the period of the courtship.
Browning knew of them for the first time when, ‘one morning,
early in 1847, Mrs Browning stole quietly after breakfast into the
room where her husband worked, thrust some manuscript into his
pocket, and then hastily withdrew! An amazing revelation even
to him they must have been of the seraphic intensity of her love.
The form of the sonnet had helped Elizabeth Barrett (as it helped
Wordsworth at times) to avoid her besetting sins. Extravagance
and diffuseness are not so possible under its rigid rules. On the
other hand, the intoxication of her passion helped to secure her
against the flatness of the commonplace. They were first privately
printed as Sonnets by E. B. B. , and, three years later, published
under their present title. These forty-four sonnets, unequal as they
are, make Elizabeth Browning's title to fame secure and go some
way towards explaining, if not also justifying, the esteem of her
contemporaries for her poetry. She was deemed the greatest of
English poetesses, perhaps rightly; her name was also suggested
(with Tennyson's but without her husband's) for the poet laureate-
ship on the death of Wordsworth. In March 1849, the Brownings'
only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett, was born, and, shortly
afterwards, Robert Browning's mother died, leaving him long
depressed. The summers of 1851 and 1852 were spent in England.
In the former year, on their return journey to Italy, they travelled
as far as Paris with Carlyle. There, among other celebrities,
they met George Sand, and, also, Joseph Milsand, who had recently
written of Browning in La Revue des Deux Mondes. Milsand's
1 The Life of Robert Browning by Griffin and Minchin.
## p. 72 (#88) ##############################################
72
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
friendship was one of the most precious in Browning's life.
Quel
homme extraordinaire ! he is reported to have said of the poet,
son centre n'est pas au milieu. The winter of 1853—4 was spent,
by way of variety, at Rome. Of the numerous journeyings from
Florence during the remaining years, it is only necessary to record
that, in the summer of 1855, the two poets carried to England
the MS of Men and Women and great part of that of Aurora
Leigh. Browning completed his volume by the addition of One
Word More, which is dated London, September 1855. During
this visit, Tennyson, in the house of Browning, read aloud his
Maud and Browning read Fra Lippo Lippi, while Dante Rossetti
listened and sketched him— Tennyson, according to W. M. Rossetti,
‘mouthing out his hollow o’s and a’s,' while Browning's voice laid
stress on all the light and shade of character, its conversational
points, its dramatic give and take. They joined Kenyon at West
Cowes, and Elizabeth Browning wrote the last pages of Aurora
Leigh under his roof and dedicated the poem to him.
On their return to Florence, they received news of the imme-
diate and very great success of the poem; and Browning, whose
Men and Women failed either to attract the public or to please the
critics, rejoiced with a great joy in her triumph.
While the Brownings were in England, Daniel D. Home, the
most notorious of American exponents of spiritualism, held a
séance at which they were present. A wreath that happened
to be on the table was raised by “spirit' hands and placed on
Elizabeth Browning's brow—the medium's own feet operating
also, Browning maintained. Home subsequently visited Florence;
and spiritualistic manifestations became for Elizabeth Browning
and some of her friends a matter of profoundly serious interest,
and for Browning himself an intolerable irritant. Nothing that
Browning wrote surpasses Mr Sludge, The Medium' in dramatic
power. It exposes more powerfully even than Blougram and
Juan and Hohenstiel-Schwangau that corruption of the soul
by a lying and selfish life which infects its whole world, making
of it a twilight region in which truth and error, right and wrong
are inextricably confused, and nothing said is either sincere or
insincere. Sludge, at least in some respects, is the greatest of
Browning's magnificent casuists, who themselves are new figures
in poetic literature: and, no doubt, it owes something of its vigour
to his distasteful experience of Home. But Home was not
the subject of the poem. Sludge the medium is as universal
and impersonal a creation as Falstaff; and, though Browning
## p. 73 (#89) ##############################################
I
111]
Mrs Browning
73
'stamped on the floor in a frenzy of rage at the way some believers
and mediums deceived Mrs Browning,' he allows Sludge to be
himself and to have his own say in so impartial a way as to
make the poem a striking revelation of the strength of the
poet's dramatic genius.
In 1859, Elizabeth Browning fell alarmingly ill : political
events-the war, the armistice and conference at Villafranca
and Napoleon's bargain excited her too much. Browning nursed
her, and took charge, also, of his son's lessons. To these, he
added the charge of the affairs of Landor, and of Landor himself
-a most difficult and delicate task. Landor had quarrelled in his
volcanic way with his family, with whom he lived at Fiesole, and
appeared homeless, penniless and with nothing but the clothes
he stood in at Casa Guidi. Browning took him into his house,
arranged and managed his affairs for him, and was loving and
tolerant with that wide generosity of spirit which made friends
of men of the most untoward temperament. Landor loved
Browning, and was tame under his hand, while Browning
amused Elizabeth by talking of Landor's 'gentleness and sweet-
ness. '
Notwithstanding the transformation' which her marriage was
said to have wrought, Elizabeth Browning's health was never com-
pletely restored, or secure-'I have never seen a human frame so
nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit,' said
Hillard of her, when he saw her in Florence. During these years,
her strength gradually waned, and on 29 June 1861, suddenly,
without any presentiment on her part or fear on his, she passed
away. Her death, it is supposed, was hastened by that of Cavour
on the sixth of the same month. She had said of him, 'if tears or
blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine. ' She
was buried in Florence, and a tablet on the walls of Casa Guidi
expresses the gratitude of the city for her advocacy of Italian
freedom. Browning's sorrow was as deep as his life; but it was
borne in his manly fashion. In order to live and work and
write,' he had 'to break up everything and go to England. ' He
never returned to Florence, nor did he visit Italy again until
1878.
Although they lived at first in happy seclusion, 'soundless and
stirless hermits,' as Elizabeth Browning said, still, no one followed
with fuller sympathy the changing fortunes of Italy. But Browning
sang neither its hopes nor its sorrows— Nationality was not an
effectual motive with him’-nor did its contemporary politics mean
## p. 74 (#90) ##############################################
74
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [[
CH.
so much for him as a poet as its medieval art. But it was other-
wise with his wife. She responded to what was present. Even the
art of which we hear in her letters is not the art of the Vatican or
the Capitol, but Story's, or Gibson's, or Page’s. She was profoundly
moved by the agitation for freedom. Italy was the land where she
herself first knew freedom, and her emotions swept her into song.
Of the four publications of her later life, two are entirely Italian in
theme-Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems before Congress
(1860). And both are political.
It was a time of revolution when the Brownings settled in
Italy, and the ferment continued throughout the whole period of
their married life. Casa Guidi Windows dealt with the earlier
phases of the movement for liberation. In its later stages, the
part taken in it by Napoleon III and the equivocal character
of his motives and actions were matter of intense interest to
them. Elizabeth Browning was his devoted defender; Browning
was alternately critical and condemnatory. Even the annexation
of Savoy and Nice' only momentarily shook her faith in him.
Browning summed up the situation by saying of Napoleon's part
in the Italian war that it was a great action but he has taken
eighteen pence for it, which is a pity. They had agreed to write
of Napoleon and publish jointly. Elizabeth Browning's labours
resulted in Poems before Congress; on the annexation, Browning
dropped the project and destroyed what he had written. But he
came back to the subject, during that period when it delighted
him most to explore the intricacies of ambiguous souls whose
morality was 'pied' and intellects casuistical; and he produced
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.
Both Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress illustrate
the difficulty of lifting contemporary politics into poetry. Neither
these nor the aftermath in her posthumous Last Poems (1862)
have added to Elizabeth Browning's literary reputation.
It remains to notice the longest and the most ambitious of
her poems--Aurora Leigh, with its eleven thousand lines of
blank verse. It was the literary venture on which she staked
her fortune; in her dedication of it to Kenyon, she calls it 'the
most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest
convictions upon Life and Art have entered. ' The readers of
her time agreed with her; critics were unanimous, and their
praise was pitched high; the first edition was exhausted in a
fortnight, and a third was required within a few months.
Later readers have become much more temperate. It is a novel
## p. 75 (#91) ##############################################
6
11] Robert Browning's Italian Period
75
in iambic decasyllables. The story is a thin thread on which are
strung the opinions of the writer on all manner of matters-
educational, social, artistic, ethical.
Elizabeth Browning's gifts were lyrical. She was essentially
a subjective poet, in the sense that the events she described and
the characters she drew were saturated with her own sympathies.
All the characters in Aurora Leigh are entirely subordinate to
the heroine, and the heroine, however little Elizabeth Browning
intended it, is the unsubstantial shadow of herself. She had no
dramatic or narrative genius. The world in which her characters
move is always created on the pattern of her own inner life,
for she dipped her brush in her own emotions. Her later poems
show some improvement in technique, and some of them are
enriched by her life in Italy and by the influence of her husband,
which was very great: for it is not Pippa Passes only which
counts for something in Aurora Leigh, nor even Paracelsus,
whose faith is paraphrased in hundreds of its lines. But they
contain nothing equal to Rhyme of the Duchess May, Cowper's
Grave and The Cry of the Children. If she is remembered
permanently, it will be, as a poet, by reason of the expression
she gave to a mother's love in A Child's Grave at Florence,
and, even more securely, by the sublime passion of the love
of wife for husband in Sonnets from the Portuguese.
The Italian period of Browning's life was comparatively barren.
It has been suggested that this was due, in part, to the fact that the
climate of Italy lowered his vitality; in part, to the unpopularity
of his works. Moreover, he took to drawing, and to modelling in
clay, copying masterpieces with intense pleasure. Only two publi-
cations of verse marked this period—Christmas Eve and Easter
Day (1850) and Men and Women (1855). He also wrote at this
time an essay on Shelley, by way of introduction to Certain Letters
of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1852), which were afterwards found to be
fabrications. The essay was evidently influenced by Milsand's
article on Browning himself, in La Revue des Deux Mondes. It
accentuates in the same way the distinction between subjective
and objective poetry, and discusses Shelley's work with much skill
and insight.
In Christmas Eve and Easter Day, critics discover clear
evidence of the influence of Elizabeth Browning's devout Christian
faith. Browning had been interested in religion all his life: for
the atheism' which he caught from Shelley was as superficial and
temporary as the vegetarianism. Pauline, Paracelsus, Pippa
## p. 76 (#92) ##############################################
76
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
Passes, all the principal poems of the early period bear witness to
his sense of the profound significance of religion. Christmas Eve
deals with contemporary attitudes towards Christianity-dissent,
the higher criticism, Roman catholicism-with a characteristic
preference for the first. Easter Day is more restrained and stern,
more full of lyric beauty and more searching in its truth. It deals
with the inner nature of the faith that is religious-religious and
not epicurean or materialistic-not seeking its evidences in out-
ward happenings or its worth in the complacency which it
brings, the zest it gives to joy, or the bitterness it takes away from
sorrow. Both poems are dramatic; neither is to be regarded as
the poet's confession of faith; nevertheless, they express the pro-
foundest of his spiritual convictions, which centred upon the most
sublime of all religious hypotheses, namely, that of the omnipotence
and omnipresence of a Christlike God, the divine power and work
of love. Saul, especially the second part, which contains the
prophecy of Christianity, Cleon, Karshish, bear witness to the
same conceptions--the omnipresent wonder that transcends defini-
tion, and is yet the sole sure light whereby man can walk and find
safe footing.
Elizabeth Browning's influence may be detected, also, in the
poems which treat of love. The original Dramatic Lyrics (the
Dramatic Lyrics as they stood before the poems transferred thereto
from Men and Women) included Cristina and in a Gondola, and
among Dramatic Romances and Lyrics there appeared The
Lost Mistress. But the collection which included A Woman's Last
Word, Any Wife to Any Husband, The Last Ride Together, One
Way of Love, among many more, was certainly a richer rendering of
the marvel of love than any of his previous works. It is probable
that no single poet, in any country, so rendered the variety of its
phases and the abundance of its power-its triumph, its failure;
its victory over the world, its defeat by the world; its passion and
poignancy; its psychical subtlety and its romance, and the im-
mensity of its spiritual significance, whether in the life of the soul
or in the outer cosmos.
Many of the poems in Men and Women of which the scene can
be determined have reference to Italy. But it is doubtful whether
his residence in Italy influenced Browning's choice of subjects to
any great extent. “He was deeply Italianised before he went to
live in Italy. To say nothing of Sordello and Pippa Passes, there
'
was an Italian group in the original Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics, which is almost as conspicuous as that of the original Men
## p. 77 (#93) ##############################################
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Dramatis Personae
77
and Women. After The Ring and the Book, Italian subjects
become both more rare and less important.
On leaving Italy, Browning settled in London. With the
change of residence came a change of habit. His Italian life,
quiet in the early years, had become gradually much more social.
In Florence, in Rome and during their visits to London, the charm
of Elizabeth Browning, and Robert Browning's own genius for
noble friendship, brought them into intimate relations with the
most gifted of their time. After her death, until the spring of
1863, he retired within himself, and his life, as he said, was ‘as
grey as the London sky. ' Then, he thought that way of life
morbid and unworthy, resolved to accept every suitable invitation
and, thenceforth, his figure was familiar in the circles of the lovers
of literature, although, except for a very few friends, all women,
none ever saw of Browning more than 'a splendid surface. '
In 1863, he was much agitated by a proposal to publish a life
of Elizabeth Browning, with letters. He turned savagely upon the
blackguards' who would 'thrust their paws into his bowels,' and
he destroyed the greater part of his own correspondence. But he
preserved the letters that had passed between himself and his
wife prior to their marriage ; with the result that hardly anyone,
except, perhaps, Carlyle, protested more strongly against the
intrusion of spies into his life's intimacies, and had the inner
shrine more ruthlessly laid bare. He, however, freely gave to the
public what had been intended for them. He republished Elizabeth
Browning's prose essays on the Greek Christian poets and the
English poets in 1863; and, two years later, made a selection from
her poems, and expressed his delight at the popularity which made
it necessary.
For three years in succession, he spent the summer months at
Ste Marie, near Pornic, where he worked at his Dramatis Personae,
published in 1864. Part of 1866 and 1867 was spent at Croisic, the
name of which is linked with The Two Poets of Croisic, as he
linked that of Pornic with Gold Hair, Red Cotton Night-Cap
Country and the gipsy woman of Fifine at the Fair.
Browning was at the height of his power during this period.
Nowhere is his poetic work so uniformly great as in Dramatis
Personae (1864); and there is no doubt that The Ring and the
Book is the most magnificent of all his achievements, in spite of
its inequalities. Critics miss in Dramatis Personae something of
the lightness and brightness and early morning charm of Pippa
Passes and of some of his earlier Men and Women; and they find
## p. 78 (#94) ##############################################
78
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
6
in it, not any trace of the pathetic fallacy, yet a lingering echo of
the brooding sorrow for his life's loss. It was later in the day, the
world was more commonplace; the outlook more desolate and
man's failure less tinged with glory; women were more homely,
love was less ethereal; and the stuff to be idealised through being
better known by a wiser love was more stubborn. "The summer
had stopped,' and 'the sky was deranged. ' But the autumn had
come, bringing a richer harvest in Dramatis Personae. The
significance of man's life, and of the clash of circumstance which
elicited it, was deeper as well as more grave. The world's worn
look disappears when it is seen in the great context in which it
stands—All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall
exist,' says Abt Vogler. Man has himself 'a flash of the will that
can,' for he can use its distraught elements of life to a moral
purpose, and weld them in a spiritual harmony-out of three
sounds make, 'not a fourth sound, but a star. ' Prospice, Rabbi
Ben Ezra, A Death in the Desert, even Mr Sludge, 'The Medium'
and Caliban upon Setebos, are strong with a controlled ethical
passion for what is real and true as things stand, and by interest
in the issues which are ultimate ; and, with this realism, natural
and spiritual, in both kinds, there is blended an imaginative
splendour which transfigures even the least of all mankind,'
when we 'look at his head and heart'; and
see what I tell you-nature dance
About each man of us, retire, advance,
As though the pageant's end were to enhance
His worth, and-once the life, his product, gained-
Roll away elsewhere.
It is a permanent theme, its echoes are to be heard all the way to
A solando—this wash of circumstance around man's soul which yet
maintains its mastery over all the play of the waves; and nowhere
is it rendered more finely than in Dramatis Personae and its
Epilogue.
The Edinburgh Review found it a 'subject of amazement
that poems of so obscure and uninviting a character should find
numerous readers’; and there were other critics besides Frederick
Tennyson who still thought Browning's poetry 'the most grotesque
conceivable. ' But the situation had, in truth, changed. Browning's
admirers were no longer confined to pre-Raphaelites and young
men at the Universities. A second edition of Dramatis Personae
was called for within the same year as the first. And the reception
accorded to The Ring and the Book was still more favourable.
6
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The Ring and the Book
79
At last, Browning was coming into his kingdom. It had taken
long: so late as 1867, he spoke of himself as 'the most unpopular
poet that ever was. '
There was an interval of four years between Dramatis Per-
sonae and The Ring and the Book. But the theme had interested
him from the moment when he came upon the 'old, square, yellow
book' on an old bookstall in Florence—the parchment-bound tale
of the trial of an Italian noble for the murder of his wife. He
saw its dramatic possibilities when he stood on the balcony of
Casa Guidi, in June 1860, at night, watching the storm. But it lay
long working in his mind, and the sorrow of the following year
led him to abandon the idea of writing, and he suggested the
subject to two of his friends. In September 1862, he recurred
to it, spoke of 'my new poem that is about to be,''the Roman
murder story. He began to write it about 1864, and the poem grew
steadily, for it became his crowning venture and he gave it regularly
every day 'three quiet, early morning hours. ' It was published
in four volumes, the first of which appeared in November 1868;
and the others during the three months following.
Many things concurred to make the story attractive to
Browning. He had inherited a taste for tales of crime from
his father; the situation was ambiguous and, as regards the priest
and the girl-wife, it left room for a most beautiful, as well as for a
sordid, explanation, and, therefore, it appealed both to Browning's
love of argument and to his ethical idealism ; moreover, opinion
in Rome was divided, and the popular mind was on its trial; there
was the possibility that the truth told for once for the church,
and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil'; and the
story, in its essence, was not a common drab, but glorious—the
romance of the young priest and Pompilia was 'a gift of God, who
showed for once how he would have the world go white. '
It was inevitable that such a theme should set free all the
powers of Browning's spirit; but it borrowed sublimity and a
sacred loveliness from another quarter. For, undoubtedly, the
poem which enshrined Pompilia was instinct with reminiscence. '
With all its abounding vitality it was yet commemorative and
memorial? ' When he wrote of 'the one prize vouchsafed unworthy
me’; of 'the one blossom that made me proud at eve’; of a 'life
companioned by the woman there'; of living and seeing her learn,
and learning by her, can there be doubt as to who lent to these
utterances their pathetic beauty?
1 Herford.
ature
UM
10
R
1
1
.
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80 Robert and Elizabeth Browning [
[CH.
6
6
Nor is it fanciful to find in Caponsacchi something of the poet
himself-more, perhaps, than in any other character he created.
There was his own tempestuousness, much that a wise old pope
could find 'amiss,' 'blameworthy,' 'ungainly,' 'discordant,' 'in-
fringement manifold' of convention ; but there was also a
“symmetric soul within,' 'championship of God at first blush,
'prompt, cheery thud of glove on ground,' answering ‘ringingly
the challenge of the false knight. ' What are these qualities, with
the ardour of a great love and the headlong and utter devotion
of a large-hearted manhood, except the poet's own ? Capon-
sacchi's
I am, on earth, as good as out of it,
A relegated priest; when exile ends,
I mean to do my duty and live long,
is inspired by the manly recoil of Browning and bis refusal
to be crushed by his sorrow. But the dream of having his 'lyric
Love' by his side has been broken ; and the bereaved poet is
not perceptible in the 'drudging student,' who 'trims his lamp,
draws the patched gown close' and awakes 'to the old solitary
nothingness. ' The last words are a promise of this priest to
'pass content, from such communion’; and Browning would fain
have come back into the world of men as if his wound had
healed. But the truth breaks out-
O great, just, good God! Miserable me!
There was, for both priest and poet, the rule in the world
of a love that wrapped all things round about, and yet, some-
how, also, there were sorrows that knew neither shores nor
shoals.
To pass all the parts of this great poem under review is not
possible, and to estimate the relative poetic worth of its several
parts—Caponsacchi, Pompilia, The Pope and Guido—is not
necessary; there are kinds as well as degrees of perfection, and
comparison is sometimes absurd. The possibility of justifying the
structure of the poem as a whole will remain doubtful; and the
maccaronic speeches of the lawyers, and some parts of what
Rome said, have no real artistic value. But the poem is unique
in its excellence as well as in its defects.
During the six years which followed The Ring and the Book,
Browning wrote nothing but long poems—with the exception
of Hervé Riel, which was published for a charitable purpose.
Balaustion's Adventure appeared in 1871. Balaustion had the
## p. 81 (#97) ##############################################
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111] Transcripts from Euripides
81
Alcestis of Euripides by heart, and, by rendering that 'strangest,
saddest, sweetest song,' saves her own life and wins for the ship
refuge in the harbour of Syracuse. Balaustion's character has the
charm of Pippa; Hercules, re-created by Browning, is magnificent
—with the gay cheer' of his great voice, heralding gladness as
he helped the world, the human and divine, i'' the weary, happy
face of him, half god, half man, which made the god-part god the
more (a favourite and recurrent conception). In Aristophanes'
Apology, Balaustion is reintroduced, and we have a second
transcript from Euripides—and, with it, above all else, the in-
comparable portrait of Aristophanes. “No ignoble presence':
‘mind a-wantoning,' it is true, but at ease,' all the same, 'of
undisputed mastery over the body's brood, those appetites. '
A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship.
The transcribed portions of both poems have only secondary
value; and the translation is said to be often tame, literal and
even awkward. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877) is said to
be an even less acceptable rendering : 'exact' and unintelligible.
It was undertaken on the suggestion of Carlyle and dedicated to
him. One would like to know what mood Carlyle was in, when
he gave his advice, telling Browning 'ye ought to translate the
whole of the Greek tragedians-that's your vocation. Browning
was better left to sport in his own way, in his own element, like
his ‘King of Pride,' 'through deep to deep,''churning the blackness
hoary. ' There is ample evidence of his wide, intimate knowledge
of the literature of Athens, and of his love of its methods; but
his strength was not similar to that of the Greeks; and he cannot
be said to have made a significant contribution either to the
knowledge or to the love, in England, of the Greek drama.
As if Browning were under compulsion to squander the
popularity gained by Dramatis Personae and The Ring and the
Book, and with both hands, there appeared, besides these Greek
poems, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair
(1872), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country or Turf and Towers
(1873) and The Inn Album (1875). Either for its theme, or for
the treatment of it, or for both theme and treatment, every one
of these poems failed to please. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,
a monologue over a cigar, illustrated by connecting blot with blot
on a 'soiled bit' of paper, is the mean and tortuous plea of a
weak, possibly well-meaning, certainly discredited, politician. Its
hero, Napoleon III, was hardly great enough to be tragical,
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CH. III.
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Robert and Elizabeth Browning [ch.
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or even picturesque. Fifine at the Fair shocked and alienated
good people. It was supposed to be a defence of illicit love; and
its style was thought as turgid as its morality was false. Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country is a novel in verse; the story of a
Paris jeweller and his mistress. It has been defended on the
ground that, as a strong treatment of the ugly, it makes the ugly
uglier! More sanely it has been disapproved as 'versified special
correspondence,'' from which every pretence of poetry is usually
remote. ' The Inn Album once more deals with illicit passion, and,
once more, is 'a novel in verse. ' Its hero is all tinsel, and 'rag
and feather sham,' irredeemably mean, smart and shallow, a cheat
at cards, growing old amid his 'scandalous successes'—a figure,
one might say, better let be by the poet. The heroine, the
betrayed girl, is a genuinely tragical figure. And the tragedy is
final, remorseless ; for she marries a parish priest who is unloving
and unloved, dull, elderly, poor, conscientious, whom she ‘used
to pity' till she learned what woes are pity-worth. Him, in an
ugly, filthy village, sterile as if' sown with salt,' she helps to drug
and dose his flock with the doctrine of heaven and hell—the latter
'made explicit. Much of this poem is powerful ; it contains
one passage strangely Shakespearean in quality : that in which
the elder lady describes her lost love, when its reality was
questioned by her betrayer. As a whole, however, it cannot
compare with Fifine at the Fair, either in range of reflective
power, or in wealth of artistic splendour, or in the weight of the
issues which are called forth. It was not without reason that
Browning spoke of Fifine as the most metaphysical and boldest
he had written since Sordello”; and not in all respects was
Swinburne's dictum wrong—' This is far better than anything
Browning has yet written. ' Its main defect is that in it, even
more than usual, ‘Browning has presumed too much upon his
reader's insight' and taken no pains to 'obviate confusions he
would have held to be impossible had they occurred to his mind. '
His experience of his critics— the inability of the human goose
to do other than either cackle or hiss'-led him to banter them in
Pacchiarotto and how he worked in Distemper (1876), which tells
the whimsical tale of the artist who tried to reform his fellows. The
poem is genial and boisterous and, in its rime, brilliant and absurd;
an instance of another of the poet's ways of Aristophanic wantoning.
