Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v13
Nevertheless, what
they meant for one another was more subtle and penetrating and
pervasive than any direct and explicit borrowing, over which the
critic could cry ‘Lo here,' or 'Lo there. ' It is more easy to suggest
and to instance than to describe their influence on each other:
but a crowning example, I believe, is to be found in Browning's
Pompilia. There are charms, and, above all, there are intensities,
scattered abroad in The Ring and the Book which would not have
been possible, even for him, had it not been for his 'lyric Love. '
No one was more eager to be dramatical than Browning, or less
willing to expose to a gaping world the pageant of his inner life.
But, after all, a poet dips his pen in his own blood when he writes
what the world must read ; if he be robbed of experience as a man,
he stands more bare as a poet; and, in the experience of both
Robert and Elizabeth Browning, there was one event paramount,
1 Fifine at the Fair.
3 Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era.
## p. 51 (#67) ##############################################
>
III ] Robert Browning's Parents 51
one sovereign fact that lent meaning to all that followed. This was
their discovery of one another and the unique perfection of their
wedded life. Criticism of the Brownings and of their meaning to
literature dare not disregard or discount a mutual penetration of
personalities so intense as theirs, but must, in dealing with the
one, be aware that it is dealing with the other as well. In this
respect, what went before in their life and work was but prelimi-
nary, and what came after mere consequent.
Robert Browning was younger than Elizabeth Barrett by some
six years. He was born in Southampton street, Camberwell, on
7 May 1812. His father was a clerk in the bank of England, of
literary and artistic tastes, and his mother the daughter of a Dundee
shipowner of German extraction.
It is more easy to read the acorn in terms of the oak than the
oak in terms of the acorn; and the great man reveals and explains,
rather than is revealed and explained by, the capacities that slum-
bered in his forefathers. While none can deny the heredity of the
features of the soul, any more than those of the body, it is idle to
pretend that the lineaments of a great man's spirit can be traced
back with any degree of accuracy to his ancestors. Every man,
even the most meagre in endowment, has so many ancestors ! But
the psychical structure and propensities of his immediate parents
have a significance all their own: for these define and determine
the environment within which the child's mind lives and moves
and has its being. The home, during the years when, most of all,
the soul is being made, stands to the child for solid earth and
starry firmament, and the influences operative therein are the
air and the food and the drink, and, therefore, the very substance
embodied in his personality. From this point of view, the simple
piety of Browning's mother, her membership of an 'Independent
Church'in Walworth, her life-long class in the Sunday school, her
box for contributions to the London Missionary society lose their
insignificance. In these and other habits, the child saw the spirit
of religion made real and ratified by his mother, and it remained
with him, much modified it is true, but, owing to his mother's memory,
permanently holy and always dominant.
Again, it must not be said that Browning's 'genius was derived
from his father. Genius is not derived. It is always a miracle
and has no history. But the father's genius, that of a lover of art
and of literature, made the son a lover of books and a collector of
them. It led him to write verse—which he did fluently and after
the manner of Pope; and he had a great delight in grotesque
4-2
## p. 52 (#68) ##############################################
52
Browning [ch.
Robert and Browning
Elizabeth Elizabeth
rimes. Moreover, he was so skilful in the use of his pencil that
Rossetti pronounced him to possess 'a real genius for drawing. '
Now, 'the handsome, vigorous, fearless child,' unrestingly active,
fiery of temper, crowded with energy of mind, observant and most
swift to learn, naturally saw all these things and, not less naturally,
imitated the ways of his parents and sought to acquire what they
valued.
In Browning's case, no educational influence counts at all, in
comparison with that of his father's tastes and habits and collection
of books. That influence can be traced in the poet's choice of
themes, all the way from Pauline and Sordello to Parleyings
and A solando, and it even marks his manner of dealing with many
of them. He read voraciously in his father's library, apparently
without let or guidance, and his acquaintance was very early with
the works of Voltaire, the letters of Junius and of Horace Walpole,
the Emblems of Quarles and Croxall's Fables. The first book he
ever bought with his own money was Macpherson's Ossian.
Side by side with this precocious literary omnivorousness
went, from early childhood, careful training in music. I was
studying the Grammar of Music,” he said, according to Mrs Ireland,
'when most children are learning the Multiplication Table. ' More-
over, he was given permission, at an age lower than the rules
allowed, to visit the Dulwich gallery, which was hard by his father's
home. It became 'a beloved haunt of his childhood. '
grateful all his life for the privilege and used to recall, in later
years, the triumphant Murillo pictures,' such a Watteau' and 'all
the Poussins' he had seen there.
The contribution made by school and college to the education
of Browning was even less significant than it has been in the case of
most great poets. His real masters, besides his father and his father's
library in general, were the poets, and especially Byron and Shelley.
'The first composition I was ever guilty of,' he wrote to Elizabeth
Barrett in 1846, 'was something in imitation of Ossian. ' But he
never could ‘recollect not writing rhymes,' though he ‘knew they
were nonsense even then. ' 'It is not surprising,' says Herford,
‘that a boy of these proclivities was captivated by the stormy swing
and sweep of Byron,' and that, as the poet told Elizabeth Barrett,
he 'would have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of
his gloves’; whereas he could not get up enthusiasm enough to
cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Southey were condensed into the little China bottle yonder? '
1 To E. B. , 22 August 1846.
>
6
## p. 53 (#69) ##############################################
>
III) Influence of Byron and Shelley 53
When he was twelve years of age, a collection under the title
Incondita was made of his 'Byronic poems,' and the father would
have liked to publish it. No publisher was found willing, and the
young author destroyed the manuscript. But the poems had been
seen by Eliza Flower (sister of the authoress of the hymn Nearer, my
God, to Thee), who made a copy of them and showed it to W. J. Fox,
editor of The Monthly Repository. According to Browning's state-
ment to Gosse, the editor found in them 'too great splendour of
language and too little wealth of thought,' but, also, a 'mellifluous
smoothness'; and Fox did not forget the boy-poet.
Browning next passed under an influence which was still more
inspiring and intimate. He chanced upon Shelley's Queen Mab on
a bookstall, and became, in consequence of assimilating it, 'a pro-
fessing atheist and a practising vegetarian. ' With some difficulty,
his mother secured for him others of ‘Mr Shelley's atheistical
poems'; and, apparently, through Adonais, he was led to Keats.
In the winter of 1829—30, he attended classes in Greek and Latin,
and, for a very short time, in German, at University college,
London; and, afterwards, Blundell’s lectures in medicine, at Guy's
hospital. Meantime, he carried on his studies in music, and sang,
danced, boxed and rode.
This, if any, was his period of Sturm und Drang-during which,
by the way, he lived on potatoes and bread! He chafed a little
at the social limitations of the home he loved well, and he gave
his
devoted parents a little entirely needless anxiety: his tempera-
ment was buoyant, his soul like a ship crowded with sails, and he
was a venturesome mariner. But his wanderings were of the
imagination, and his 'excesses' were literary both in origin and
in outcome. In truth, all the time, he was living within the
bounds, nay, drawing his strength and his inspiration from those
convictions of the stable things of the world of spirit in the
power of which he went forth, in later days, to challenge, in every
form of joust and tournament and in many an adventure, the forces
of doubt and falsehood and denial and crime. He had not to
suffer in his later life from any treacherous aches of half-forgotten
wounds to character, but faced life sound in every limb and
(one is tempted to add) arrogantly healthy.
The wholesome and wealthy confusion of this seething period of
the young poet's life is faithfully rendered or, rather, betrayed,
in the brilliant and incoherent Pauline-Browning's earliest
published poem. Pauline herself, except for the first half-dozen
lines and a footnote, is the shadow of a shade—the passive
## p. 54 (#70) ##############################################
54
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
recipient of the psychological confessions of a young poet : a
young poet, who, not at all unaware of his curls and lace and
ruffles, has been turning himself round and round before the mirror,
and has found that he is too noble a being, too bold, reckless,
unrestrained, sceptical, brilliant, intense, wide-souled, hungry for
knowledge and love for this work-a-day world. The self-conscious-
ness is not ‘intense,' as J. S. Mill thought. It is picturesque.
It is not ‘morbid' or unwholesome, as other critics have averred.
It is only the frippery, the most serious mock-believe tragical out-
pourings of an extraordinarily handsome and innocent youth, who,
in truth, had never known disappointment nor looked in the face
of sorrow. Browning's dislike of the poem in later years was
.
entirely natural. He resented all prying into private life, and
was, of all men, least willing to ‘sonnet-sing about himself. ' So,
the drapery in which he had clothed himself in this early poem
seemed to him to be almost transparent, and he felt as if he had
been going about nude.
Pauline was published in January 1833, anonymously, when its
author was twenty years old. But that fine critic W. J. Fox dis-
cerned its merit and dealt with it in generous praise in The
Monthly Repository for April in the same year. Allan Cunningham,
also, praised it in The Athenaeum. Some years later (probably in
1850), Rossetti found and transcribed it in the reading room of the
British Museum, and he wrote to Browning, who was in Florence,
to ask him ‘whether he was the author of a poem called Pauline. '
Beyond this, the poem attracted no attention. Why, it is difficult
to say. That it is mastered by its material, flooded by its own
wealth, is true. Of all Browning's poems, it is the only one which
owes its difficulty to confusion; and it is, in fact, to use the poet's
own phrase, a “boyish work. But what work for a boy! There
are passages in it, not a few, of a beauty that exceeds so much as
to belong to a sphere of being into which mediocrity never for
a moment gains entry. So long as he has this theatrically earnest
boy at his side, the reader is never safe from the surprise of some
sudden splash of splendour :
>
the boy
With his white breast and brow and clustering curls
Streaked with his mother's blood, but striving hard
To tell his story ere his reason goes.
6
He is “exploring passion and mind,' he says, 'for the first time,'
'dreaming not of restraint but gazing on all things. ' He is 'borne
away, as Arab birds float sleeping in the wind, o'er deserts, towers,
## p. 55 (#71) ##############################################
111]
Paracelsus
55
and forests. ' He 'nourishes music more than life, and old lore,' and
“knows the words shall move men, like a swift wind. ' In every way,
Pauline must remain a supremely interesting poem to Browning's
readers: it holds in bud many of Browning's qualities, powers
and even convictions.
After the publication of Pauline, in 1833, Browning visited
Petrograd with Benkhausen, the Russian consul general; and it was
probably this contact with official life which led him, shortly after
his return to England, to apply-in vain--for a post on a Persian
mission. During this period, there is ample evidence of physical
and mental exuberance, but little of poetic activity. It was many
years later that the Russian visit yielded the forest-scene of the
thrilling tale of Ivan Ivanovitch, and his toying with the Persian
mission (possibly) suggested Ferishtah. But his interest in the
complicated subtleties of diplomacy appeared in Sordello and
Strafford as well as in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau—not to
mention Bishop Blougram and Caliban upon Setebos. In 1834,
however, there appeared in The Monthly Repository a series of
five poetic contributions of which the most noteworthy were
Porphyria, afterwards entitled Porphyria's Lover, and the six
stanzas beginning Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no,'
which were republished in James Lee's Wife. Then, with a
preface dated 15 March 1835, when its author still lacked two
months of completing his twenty-third year, there appeared one of
the most marvellous productions of youthful poetic genius in the
history of any literature.
Browning is said to have written Paracelsus in six months,
meditating not a few of its passages during midnight walks, within
sight of the glare of London lights, and the muffled hearing of its
quieting tumult. This poem belongs to an altogether different
altitude from that of Pauline. Instead of a confused rendering
of vague dreams and seething sentiments and passions, we have, in
Paracelsus, the story of the lithe and sinewy strength of early
manhood, the manifold powers of a most gifted spirit braced
together and passionately dedicated to the service of an iron-hard
intellectual ambition. Here is the 'intensest life' resolute upon
“
acquiring, at any cost, the intellectual mastery of mankind.
The subject was suggested to Browning by a French royalist
and refugee, count Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, and the poem is
dedicated to him. Browning was already acquainted with the
career and character of Paracelsus—his works were in his father's
library. Moreover, it is beyond doubt that, at this stage of his
>
## p. 56 (#72) ##############################################
56
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [ch.
life, in particular, the poet was driven by a like hunger for know-
ledge and ambition for intellectual sovereignty. His reading of
his subject implies affinity of mind and is altogether sympathetic.
The eccentricities of behaviour, the charlatanism, the boundless
conceit, the miracles and absurdities with which Paracelsus was
accredited by popular belief, either disappear or are sublimated
into elements of a dramatic romance which has something of the
greatness and seriousness of tragedy. To assume that Browning,
in this poem, was depicting 'the fall of a logician,' or of set design
'destroying the intellectualist fallacy,' is to misunderstand the
spirit in which the poem was written. The adventurous alchemist
was himself too much a poet to serve such an unpoetic purpose,
even if Browning had been so little a poet as to form it.
Paracelsus does not 'fall': he 'attains. '
Far from convicting him of intellectual futility, Browning actually made
him divine the secret he sought, and, in one of the most splendid passages of
modern poetry, declare with his dying lips a faith which is no less Browning's
than his ownl.
True! knowledge without love is not even power; but neither is
love without knowledge; and the consummation of the achieve-
ment of Paracelsus is that love becomes the means of knowledge
and intelligence the instrument of love. "The simultaneous per-
ception of Love and Power in the Absolute' was, in Browning's
view, the noblest and predominant characteristic of Shelley ’; and,
for Browning, even in his most ‘metaphysical' days, when know-
ledge was always said to have 'failed,' it was still a power.
Paracelsus is the most miraculous and inexplicable of all the
exhibitions of Browning's genius. The promise it contained, with
all the poet's lasting greatness, was not fulfilled. Its form and
artistic manner, the lineaments and the movements of the mind
which works within it, the noble passions which moved the poet
and the faith which inspired and controlled him—these are pre-
eminently illuminating to the student of Browning and by far the
best introduction to all he strove to do. Paracelsus is interesting,
also, as touching the new times which were dawning around the
young poet. In its closing pages, something of the spirit of modern
science comes forth, for the moment, at least, wearing the garb of
poetry. Never was the conception of the evolutionary continuity
of nature more marvellously rendered,
as successive zones
Of several wonder open on some spirit
Flying secure and glad from heaven to heaven.
1 Herford.
## p. 57 (#73) ##############################################
6
111]
Paracelsus
57
The young poet had even grasped, what took the world another
half-century to perceive, that the idea of evolution levelled up-
wards and not downwards, spiritualised nature rather than
naturalised spirit.
The minor characters of Paracelsus need not detain us. Festus
is the commonsense foil of the hero, and the gentle domestic
Michal, maiden and sorrowing mother, is only less of a shadow
than Pauline. Aprile is an unsubstantial moonstruck'wraith of
a poet,' who 'would love infinitely and be loved’; but his rôle is
most significantly derived and borrowed and accidental.
I saw Aprile-my Aprile there!
And as the poor melodious wretch disburthened
His heart, and moaned his weakness in my ear,
I learned my own deep error.
Paracelsus learnt from him 'the worth of love in man's estate and
what proportion love should hold with power. ' It was this new
knowledge which made him wise to know mankind,
be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
all with a touch of nobleness. . . upward tending,'
Like plants in mines which never saw the sun,
But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
And do their best to climb and get to him.
With this knowledge, this ‘splendour of God's lamp' on his dying
brow, he is as secure of emerging one day,' as he was when he first
set forth 'to prove his soul. '
Paracelsus, on its publication, was hailed by the ever faithful
and watchful Fox; but the most striking notice it received was
from John Forster. He predicted for the author a brilliant career,
and, in a second article on the poem, said, with unusual daring as
well as insight, 'Without the slightest hesitation we name Mr Robert
Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth. But, by
most journals, Paracelsus was simply neglected. In his letters
to Elizabeth Barrett, Browning refers to the contemptuous treat-
ment it received. It brought him neither money nor fame.
But it brought him, first, the acquaintance, and, then, the friend-
ship, of the most distinguished men of the day-among them were
Wordsworth, Dickens, Landor and Carlyle; and in nothing was the
manly munificence of Browning's nature more evident than in his
friendships. His affection for Landor, touched with sympathy as
well as admiration, showed itself, in later years, in a care for him
a
## p. 58 (#74) ##############################################
58
[
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
6
6
a
which was one of the most beautiful incidents in a beautiful life. '
The friendship with Carlyle was, on both sides, peculiarly warm
and trustful. “I have just seen dear Carlyle,' says Browning,
'catch me calling people “dear,” in a hurry’; and that Carlyle
should cross over to Paris just to see and dine with Browning is,
assuredly, eloquent of his regard and affection for the young poet.
Commanded of me by my venerated friend Thomas Carlyle,' says
Browning of his translation of Agamemnon, ‘and rewarded will it
indeed become if I am permitted to dignify it by the prefatory
insertion of his dear and noble name. ' John Forster and William
Macready were also added at this time to the group of Browning's
friends, and his acquaintance with the latter had, for a time, an
important bearing upon his work.
In Pauline and Paracelsus, it has been well said, Browning
had 'analysed rather than exhibited character. The soul, the
one thing' which he thought 'worth knowing,' was the psycho-
logist's abstract entity, little more than a stage occupied successively
by moods and passions: it was not the concrete, complex self,
veined and blood-tinctured. Moreover (which signifies much),
all its history fell within itself, and external circumstance, instead
of furnishing it with the material out of which character is hewn,
was but decoration,' to use Browning's own phrase, and was
purposely put into the background. These two poems were thus
justly called “confessional': they were subjective and self-conscious.
No sooner was Paracelsus finished than Browning contemplated
another 'soul-history. In it, once more, a greatly aspiring soul
was to recognise, only at the last moment and after much ‘apparent
failure,' the mission which could save, fitting to the finite his infinity.
The story that he wished to tell was Sordello.
But the material was stubborn as well as rich, and it resisted
easy and early mastery. Possibly, also, the 'confessional' mood
was passing. In any case, Browning, who was always and almost
solely interested in human character, was thinking of depicting
character in action. He was eager, as he said in his preface to
Strafford, 'to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy
natures of a grand epoch. ' Browning's mind, no doubt, was
turned to Strafford by Forster, who, with some help from Browning,
had written the great statesman's life. But it was at a supper
given by Talfourd to celebrate the first performance of Ion
that Macready, to whom Browning had already spoken of his
intention of writing a tragedy, said 'Write a play, Browning, and
keep me from going to America. ' Strafford, which was the result
6
6
## p. 59 (#75) ##############################################
111]
Strafford
59
1
of the request, was acted at Covent garden theatre on 1 May 1837
-Macready appearing as Strafford and Helen Faucit as lady
Carlisle. Its stage history was brief. It was not damned on
''
the first night, but just escaped; it was applauded on the second ;
and it died an unnatural death after the fifth. It was betrayed :
the player who acted Pym refusing 'to save England even once
more,' and Browning vowing that 'never again would he write
a play! '
The tragical element in the play is the collision of the two
loyalties—that of Strafford to the king and that of Pym to Eng-
land : and the tragedy borrows its intensity from the fact that the
king whom Strafford loves will not save him, and that Pym, who
loves Strafford, sends him to his death. Pym 'was used to stroll
with him, arm locked in arm,' and, in early days, had even read the
same needs in England's face, while
Eliot's brow grew broad with noble thoughts.
The atmosphere of the play is that of'a thorough self-devotement,
self-forgetting. The characters are all simple, and apt to be always
in one condition of mind. They have a generous magnitude and
strength and vigour; but they are too consistently in a state of
exaltation, inclined to be declamatory and self-conscious and to be
always expounding the movements of their own minds. Indeed,
not one of Browning's characters in any of his plays fairly comes
out into the open air and on the high road, except, perhaps,
Pippa.
In the preface to Strafford, Browning says that 'he had for
some time been engaged on a Poem of a very different nature,
when induced to make the present attempt. ' This poem, as already
hinted, was Sordello, Browning's second study of a poetic soul,
but a soul, this time, caught in the context of large and imperious
circumstance and quite unlike Aprile.
Many have explained Sordello, and some have comprehended
it. It is uncompromisingly and irretrievably difficult reading.
No historical account of the conflicts of Ghibelline and Guelph,
no expository annotation of any kind, not even its own wealth of
luminous ideas or splendour of Italian city scenes and solitudes,
can justify it entirely as a work of art. We may render its main
plot in simple terms: how Sordello, endowed with powers that
might have made him the Apollo of his people and victorious in
a contest of song over Eglamor, his poetic foil, finds, unexpectedly,
eminent station and political power within his grasp, but gains a
## p. 60 (#76) ##############################################
60
[
Robert and Elizabeth Browning (CH.
a
victory of another kind, rising superior to the temptation doubly
urged by the Ghibelline captain and the beauty of Parma; how the
double victory has still left him a dabbler and loiterer, a Hamlet
in both poetry and politics; how, clinging to his ideal, the cause of
humanity, but failing to make it dominant over his ‘finite' world,
he dies under the strain of choice. ' But no simplification of the
story suffices. It is dark from the very intensity and multiplicity
of the playing cross-lights ; for the main ideas are reflected in-
numerably from the countless facets of the facts which the poet
displays in confusingly rapid succession. Brilliancy, swiftness of
movement, the sudden exclamation made to convey a complex
thought, the crowded intrusion of parenthetical antecedents, the
elision of connecting relatives-such are the characteristics which
make it difficult to decipher.
It is no wonder that the appearance of Sordello, in 1840,
destroyed the somewhat timid promise of public favour which
Paracelsus had brought to the poet. We are told that the 'gentle
literary public of those days had found Sartor Resartus un-
intelligible, and frankly turned away from Browning. But the
suggested comparison is misleading and the criticism is unfair.
The difficulties of Sartor have disappeared with the new times
which Carlyle introduced ; those of Sordello will stay so long as
the mental structure of men remains the same.
'I blame no one,' said Browning, 'least of all myself, who did
my best then and since. ' It was in no perverse mood of intellectual
pride or of scorn for the public mind that he wrote Sordello. His
error was, rather, the opposite. "Freighted full of music,' crowded
with the wealth of his detailed knowledge, rapt with the splendour
of his poetic visions, he, in the simplicity of his heart, forgot his
public so completely as to assume, as a matter of course, that his
readers were able to wing their flight at his side.
There are evidences that the experience was painful and that
its effects lasted. In The Ring and the Book, and elsewhere, there
is, in the resolute simplification of the narrative and the painful
iteration, a clue to the effect of the failure of Sordello upon his
workmanship. Both as he entered upon and as he closed that
greatest of all his poetic adventures, there is a hint of a challenge
and a touch of reproof, and even scorn, of the British Public,'
6
a
ye who like me not,
(God love you!
)—whom I yet have laboured for,
Perchance more careful whoso runs may read
Than erst when all, it seemed, could read who ran.
## p. 61 (#77) ##############################################
111]
Bells and Pomegranates
61
6
6
But it is time to turn to the outward events of this period of
Browning's life. These were his journey to Italy and the removal
of the family to Hatcham. He started for Italy on Good Friday
1838, travelling as sole passenger on a merchantman. On the
voyage, he wrote the glorious story of the ride from Ghent to Aix,
and Home Thoughts from the Sea. One of his objects was to
gather materials for Sordello; but he harvested much more from
his visit. It was, for him, 'a time of enchantment. ' He saw Asolo
and Venice and Padua ; he visited mountain solitudes, and he
brought home a passionate and enduring love for Italy. Italian
themes were, henceforth, to be favourites of his imagination, and
his life in that country was, for many years to come, to saturate
his experience.
At the time when Browning was going to begin the finishing
of Sordello,' as he wrote to Miss Haworth, he was also beginning
‘thinking a Tragedy. ' He had still another tragedy in prospect, he
tells us, and wrote best so provided. The two tragedies were King
Victor and King Charles and The Return of the Druses. He was
also occupied with what was not strictly a play, but a new poetic
form—a series of scenes connected together like pearls on a silken
thread by the magic influence of the little silk-winder of Asolo—the
exquisitely beautiful and simple Pippa Passes. The plays were
written with the view of being acted; but Macready's refusal kept
them back, for a time, and they were published. They appeared
in a series of what may be called poetical pamphlets, issued between
1841 and 1846, which undoubtedly constituted as remarkable
literary merchandise as was ever offered to any public. This plan
of publication was suggested by Moxon, and was intended to
popularise the poet's works by selling them cheaply. They were
at first sold at sixpence. But (among other hindrances) they
were called Bells and Pomegranates, and it was only at the close
of the series and on the instigation of Elizabeth Barrett that
Browning explained to the puzzled readers how it was intended
by this reference to the hem of the robe of the high priest' to
indicate the mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense,
poetry with thought,' which the pamphlets were. Moreover,
literary critics had not forgotten or forgiven Sordello, and literary
prejudice is stubborn stuff. Even Pippa Passes, the first of the
series, had a reluctant and frigid reception. A generously apprecia-
tive article, in The Eclectic Review, in 1849, mentions it along with
Sordello as one of the poems against which the loudest complaints
of obscurity have been raised. '
## p. 62 (#78) ##############################################
62
[ch.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
6
Nothing that Browning ever wrote was better fitted than
Pippa Passes to arrest the public attention. It was as novel in
charm as it was in form. Pippa herself, it has been suggested",
is Browning's Ariel-a magic influence in the magic isle of man's
world. The little silk-winder, walking along the streets of Asolo
on her 'one day in the year' and fancying herself to be, in turn,
each of its 'Four Happiest Ones,' pours forth her lyric soul in song.
The songs striking into the world of passions, plots and crimes, in
which the 'Four Happiest Ones' were involved, arrest, cleanse and
transform. She is as charming as the lyrics she carols. Elizabeth
Barrett . could find in her heart to envy the Author,' and Pippa
was Browning's own favourite among the creations of his early
manhood. She has "crept into the study of imagination' of all
his readers ever since.
Pippa Passes was followed, in 1842, by King Victor and
King Charles, and that tragedy, in turn, by a collection of some
sixteen short pieces, which were called Dramatic Lyrics. Then,
in 1843, appeared The Return of the Druses, written some years
earlier, and two other plays —A Blot in the 'Scutcheon and
Colombe's Birthday (published in 1844). These were followed
by another collection of short poems, on the greatest variety of
subjects, entitled Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. 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,
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
## 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.
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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) ##############################################
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.
they meant for one another was more subtle and penetrating and
pervasive than any direct and explicit borrowing, over which the
critic could cry ‘Lo here,' or 'Lo there. ' It is more easy to suggest
and to instance than to describe their influence on each other:
but a crowning example, I believe, is to be found in Browning's
Pompilia. There are charms, and, above all, there are intensities,
scattered abroad in The Ring and the Book which would not have
been possible, even for him, had it not been for his 'lyric Love. '
No one was more eager to be dramatical than Browning, or less
willing to expose to a gaping world the pageant of his inner life.
But, after all, a poet dips his pen in his own blood when he writes
what the world must read ; if he be robbed of experience as a man,
he stands more bare as a poet; and, in the experience of both
Robert and Elizabeth Browning, there was one event paramount,
1 Fifine at the Fair.
3 Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era.
## p. 51 (#67) ##############################################
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III ] Robert Browning's Parents 51
one sovereign fact that lent meaning to all that followed. This was
their discovery of one another and the unique perfection of their
wedded life. Criticism of the Brownings and of their meaning to
literature dare not disregard or discount a mutual penetration of
personalities so intense as theirs, but must, in dealing with the
one, be aware that it is dealing with the other as well. In this
respect, what went before in their life and work was but prelimi-
nary, and what came after mere consequent.
Robert Browning was younger than Elizabeth Barrett by some
six years. He was born in Southampton street, Camberwell, on
7 May 1812. His father was a clerk in the bank of England, of
literary and artistic tastes, and his mother the daughter of a Dundee
shipowner of German extraction.
It is more easy to read the acorn in terms of the oak than the
oak in terms of the acorn; and the great man reveals and explains,
rather than is revealed and explained by, the capacities that slum-
bered in his forefathers. While none can deny the heredity of the
features of the soul, any more than those of the body, it is idle to
pretend that the lineaments of a great man's spirit can be traced
back with any degree of accuracy to his ancestors. Every man,
even the most meagre in endowment, has so many ancestors ! But
the psychical structure and propensities of his immediate parents
have a significance all their own: for these define and determine
the environment within which the child's mind lives and moves
and has its being. The home, during the years when, most of all,
the soul is being made, stands to the child for solid earth and
starry firmament, and the influences operative therein are the
air and the food and the drink, and, therefore, the very substance
embodied in his personality. From this point of view, the simple
piety of Browning's mother, her membership of an 'Independent
Church'in Walworth, her life-long class in the Sunday school, her
box for contributions to the London Missionary society lose their
insignificance. In these and other habits, the child saw the spirit
of religion made real and ratified by his mother, and it remained
with him, much modified it is true, but, owing to his mother's memory,
permanently holy and always dominant.
Again, it must not be said that Browning's 'genius was derived
from his father. Genius is not derived. It is always a miracle
and has no history. But the father's genius, that of a lover of art
and of literature, made the son a lover of books and a collector of
them. It led him to write verse—which he did fluently and after
the manner of Pope; and he had a great delight in grotesque
4-2
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Browning [ch.
Robert and Browning
Elizabeth Elizabeth
rimes. Moreover, he was so skilful in the use of his pencil that
Rossetti pronounced him to possess 'a real genius for drawing. '
Now, 'the handsome, vigorous, fearless child,' unrestingly active,
fiery of temper, crowded with energy of mind, observant and most
swift to learn, naturally saw all these things and, not less naturally,
imitated the ways of his parents and sought to acquire what they
valued.
In Browning's case, no educational influence counts at all, in
comparison with that of his father's tastes and habits and collection
of books. That influence can be traced in the poet's choice of
themes, all the way from Pauline and Sordello to Parleyings
and A solando, and it even marks his manner of dealing with many
of them. He read voraciously in his father's library, apparently
without let or guidance, and his acquaintance was very early with
the works of Voltaire, the letters of Junius and of Horace Walpole,
the Emblems of Quarles and Croxall's Fables. The first book he
ever bought with his own money was Macpherson's Ossian.
Side by side with this precocious literary omnivorousness
went, from early childhood, careful training in music. I was
studying the Grammar of Music,” he said, according to Mrs Ireland,
'when most children are learning the Multiplication Table. ' More-
over, he was given permission, at an age lower than the rules
allowed, to visit the Dulwich gallery, which was hard by his father's
home. It became 'a beloved haunt of his childhood. '
grateful all his life for the privilege and used to recall, in later
years, the triumphant Murillo pictures,' such a Watteau' and 'all
the Poussins' he had seen there.
The contribution made by school and college to the education
of Browning was even less significant than it has been in the case of
most great poets. His real masters, besides his father and his father's
library in general, were the poets, and especially Byron and Shelley.
'The first composition I was ever guilty of,' he wrote to Elizabeth
Barrett in 1846, 'was something in imitation of Ossian. ' But he
never could ‘recollect not writing rhymes,' though he ‘knew they
were nonsense even then. ' 'It is not surprising,' says Herford,
‘that a boy of these proclivities was captivated by the stormy swing
and sweep of Byron,' and that, as the poet told Elizabeth Barrett,
he 'would have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of
his gloves’; whereas he could not get up enthusiasm enough to
cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Southey were condensed into the little China bottle yonder? '
1 To E. B. , 22 August 1846.
>
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III) Influence of Byron and Shelley 53
When he was twelve years of age, a collection under the title
Incondita was made of his 'Byronic poems,' and the father would
have liked to publish it. No publisher was found willing, and the
young author destroyed the manuscript. But the poems had been
seen by Eliza Flower (sister of the authoress of the hymn Nearer, my
God, to Thee), who made a copy of them and showed it to W. J. Fox,
editor of The Monthly Repository. According to Browning's state-
ment to Gosse, the editor found in them 'too great splendour of
language and too little wealth of thought,' but, also, a 'mellifluous
smoothness'; and Fox did not forget the boy-poet.
Browning next passed under an influence which was still more
inspiring and intimate. He chanced upon Shelley's Queen Mab on
a bookstall, and became, in consequence of assimilating it, 'a pro-
fessing atheist and a practising vegetarian. ' With some difficulty,
his mother secured for him others of ‘Mr Shelley's atheistical
poems'; and, apparently, through Adonais, he was led to Keats.
In the winter of 1829—30, he attended classes in Greek and Latin,
and, for a very short time, in German, at University college,
London; and, afterwards, Blundell’s lectures in medicine, at Guy's
hospital. Meantime, he carried on his studies in music, and sang,
danced, boxed and rode.
This, if any, was his period of Sturm und Drang-during which,
by the way, he lived on potatoes and bread! He chafed a little
at the social limitations of the home he loved well, and he gave
his
devoted parents a little entirely needless anxiety: his tempera-
ment was buoyant, his soul like a ship crowded with sails, and he
was a venturesome mariner. But his wanderings were of the
imagination, and his 'excesses' were literary both in origin and
in outcome. In truth, all the time, he was living within the
bounds, nay, drawing his strength and his inspiration from those
convictions of the stable things of the world of spirit in the
power of which he went forth, in later days, to challenge, in every
form of joust and tournament and in many an adventure, the forces
of doubt and falsehood and denial and crime. He had not to
suffer in his later life from any treacherous aches of half-forgotten
wounds to character, but faced life sound in every limb and
(one is tempted to add) arrogantly healthy.
The wholesome and wealthy confusion of this seething period of
the young poet's life is faithfully rendered or, rather, betrayed,
in the brilliant and incoherent Pauline-Browning's earliest
published poem. Pauline herself, except for the first half-dozen
lines and a footnote, is the shadow of a shade—the passive
## p. 54 (#70) ##############################################
54
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
recipient of the psychological confessions of a young poet : a
young poet, who, not at all unaware of his curls and lace and
ruffles, has been turning himself round and round before the mirror,
and has found that he is too noble a being, too bold, reckless,
unrestrained, sceptical, brilliant, intense, wide-souled, hungry for
knowledge and love for this work-a-day world. The self-conscious-
ness is not ‘intense,' as J. S. Mill thought. It is picturesque.
It is not ‘morbid' or unwholesome, as other critics have averred.
It is only the frippery, the most serious mock-believe tragical out-
pourings of an extraordinarily handsome and innocent youth, who,
in truth, had never known disappointment nor looked in the face
of sorrow. Browning's dislike of the poem in later years was
.
entirely natural. He resented all prying into private life, and
was, of all men, least willing to ‘sonnet-sing about himself. ' So,
the drapery in which he had clothed himself in this early poem
seemed to him to be almost transparent, and he felt as if he had
been going about nude.
Pauline was published in January 1833, anonymously, when its
author was twenty years old. But that fine critic W. J. Fox dis-
cerned its merit and dealt with it in generous praise in The
Monthly Repository for April in the same year. Allan Cunningham,
also, praised it in The Athenaeum. Some years later (probably in
1850), Rossetti found and transcribed it in the reading room of the
British Museum, and he wrote to Browning, who was in Florence,
to ask him ‘whether he was the author of a poem called Pauline. '
Beyond this, the poem attracted no attention. Why, it is difficult
to say. That it is mastered by its material, flooded by its own
wealth, is true. Of all Browning's poems, it is the only one which
owes its difficulty to confusion; and it is, in fact, to use the poet's
own phrase, a “boyish work. But what work for a boy! There
are passages in it, not a few, of a beauty that exceeds so much as
to belong to a sphere of being into which mediocrity never for
a moment gains entry. So long as he has this theatrically earnest
boy at his side, the reader is never safe from the surprise of some
sudden splash of splendour :
>
the boy
With his white breast and brow and clustering curls
Streaked with his mother's blood, but striving hard
To tell his story ere his reason goes.
6
He is “exploring passion and mind,' he says, 'for the first time,'
'dreaming not of restraint but gazing on all things. ' He is 'borne
away, as Arab birds float sleeping in the wind, o'er deserts, towers,
## p. 55 (#71) ##############################################
111]
Paracelsus
55
and forests. ' He 'nourishes music more than life, and old lore,' and
“knows the words shall move men, like a swift wind. ' In every way,
Pauline must remain a supremely interesting poem to Browning's
readers: it holds in bud many of Browning's qualities, powers
and even convictions.
After the publication of Pauline, in 1833, Browning visited
Petrograd with Benkhausen, the Russian consul general; and it was
probably this contact with official life which led him, shortly after
his return to England, to apply-in vain--for a post on a Persian
mission. During this period, there is ample evidence of physical
and mental exuberance, but little of poetic activity. It was many
years later that the Russian visit yielded the forest-scene of the
thrilling tale of Ivan Ivanovitch, and his toying with the Persian
mission (possibly) suggested Ferishtah. But his interest in the
complicated subtleties of diplomacy appeared in Sordello and
Strafford as well as in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau—not to
mention Bishop Blougram and Caliban upon Setebos. In 1834,
however, there appeared in The Monthly Repository a series of
five poetic contributions of which the most noteworthy were
Porphyria, afterwards entitled Porphyria's Lover, and the six
stanzas beginning Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no,'
which were republished in James Lee's Wife. Then, with a
preface dated 15 March 1835, when its author still lacked two
months of completing his twenty-third year, there appeared one of
the most marvellous productions of youthful poetic genius in the
history of any literature.
Browning is said to have written Paracelsus in six months,
meditating not a few of its passages during midnight walks, within
sight of the glare of London lights, and the muffled hearing of its
quieting tumult. This poem belongs to an altogether different
altitude from that of Pauline. Instead of a confused rendering
of vague dreams and seething sentiments and passions, we have, in
Paracelsus, the story of the lithe and sinewy strength of early
manhood, the manifold powers of a most gifted spirit braced
together and passionately dedicated to the service of an iron-hard
intellectual ambition. Here is the 'intensest life' resolute upon
“
acquiring, at any cost, the intellectual mastery of mankind.
The subject was suggested to Browning by a French royalist
and refugee, count Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, and the poem is
dedicated to him. Browning was already acquainted with the
career and character of Paracelsus—his works were in his father's
library. Moreover, it is beyond doubt that, at this stage of his
>
## p. 56 (#72) ##############################################
56
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [ch.
life, in particular, the poet was driven by a like hunger for know-
ledge and ambition for intellectual sovereignty. His reading of
his subject implies affinity of mind and is altogether sympathetic.
The eccentricities of behaviour, the charlatanism, the boundless
conceit, the miracles and absurdities with which Paracelsus was
accredited by popular belief, either disappear or are sublimated
into elements of a dramatic romance which has something of the
greatness and seriousness of tragedy. To assume that Browning,
in this poem, was depicting 'the fall of a logician,' or of set design
'destroying the intellectualist fallacy,' is to misunderstand the
spirit in which the poem was written. The adventurous alchemist
was himself too much a poet to serve such an unpoetic purpose,
even if Browning had been so little a poet as to form it.
Paracelsus does not 'fall': he 'attains. '
Far from convicting him of intellectual futility, Browning actually made
him divine the secret he sought, and, in one of the most splendid passages of
modern poetry, declare with his dying lips a faith which is no less Browning's
than his ownl.
True! knowledge without love is not even power; but neither is
love without knowledge; and the consummation of the achieve-
ment of Paracelsus is that love becomes the means of knowledge
and intelligence the instrument of love. "The simultaneous per-
ception of Love and Power in the Absolute' was, in Browning's
view, the noblest and predominant characteristic of Shelley ’; and,
for Browning, even in his most ‘metaphysical' days, when know-
ledge was always said to have 'failed,' it was still a power.
Paracelsus is the most miraculous and inexplicable of all the
exhibitions of Browning's genius. The promise it contained, with
all the poet's lasting greatness, was not fulfilled. Its form and
artistic manner, the lineaments and the movements of the mind
which works within it, the noble passions which moved the poet
and the faith which inspired and controlled him—these are pre-
eminently illuminating to the student of Browning and by far the
best introduction to all he strove to do. Paracelsus is interesting,
also, as touching the new times which were dawning around the
young poet. In its closing pages, something of the spirit of modern
science comes forth, for the moment, at least, wearing the garb of
poetry. Never was the conception of the evolutionary continuity
of nature more marvellously rendered,
as successive zones
Of several wonder open on some spirit
Flying secure and glad from heaven to heaven.
1 Herford.
## p. 57 (#73) ##############################################
6
111]
Paracelsus
57
The young poet had even grasped, what took the world another
half-century to perceive, that the idea of evolution levelled up-
wards and not downwards, spiritualised nature rather than
naturalised spirit.
The minor characters of Paracelsus need not detain us. Festus
is the commonsense foil of the hero, and the gentle domestic
Michal, maiden and sorrowing mother, is only less of a shadow
than Pauline. Aprile is an unsubstantial moonstruck'wraith of
a poet,' who 'would love infinitely and be loved’; but his rôle is
most significantly derived and borrowed and accidental.
I saw Aprile-my Aprile there!
And as the poor melodious wretch disburthened
His heart, and moaned his weakness in my ear,
I learned my own deep error.
Paracelsus learnt from him 'the worth of love in man's estate and
what proportion love should hold with power. ' It was this new
knowledge which made him wise to know mankind,
be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
all with a touch of nobleness. . . upward tending,'
Like plants in mines which never saw the sun,
But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
And do their best to climb and get to him.
With this knowledge, this ‘splendour of God's lamp' on his dying
brow, he is as secure of emerging one day,' as he was when he first
set forth 'to prove his soul. '
Paracelsus, on its publication, was hailed by the ever faithful
and watchful Fox; but the most striking notice it received was
from John Forster. He predicted for the author a brilliant career,
and, in a second article on the poem, said, with unusual daring as
well as insight, 'Without the slightest hesitation we name Mr Robert
Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth. But, by
most journals, Paracelsus was simply neglected. In his letters
to Elizabeth Barrett, Browning refers to the contemptuous treat-
ment it received. It brought him neither money nor fame.
But it brought him, first, the acquaintance, and, then, the friend-
ship, of the most distinguished men of the day-among them were
Wordsworth, Dickens, Landor and Carlyle; and in nothing was the
manly munificence of Browning's nature more evident than in his
friendships. His affection for Landor, touched with sympathy as
well as admiration, showed itself, in later years, in a care for him
a
## p. 58 (#74) ##############################################
58
[
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH.
6
6
a
which was one of the most beautiful incidents in a beautiful life. '
The friendship with Carlyle was, on both sides, peculiarly warm
and trustful. “I have just seen dear Carlyle,' says Browning,
'catch me calling people “dear,” in a hurry’; and that Carlyle
should cross over to Paris just to see and dine with Browning is,
assuredly, eloquent of his regard and affection for the young poet.
Commanded of me by my venerated friend Thomas Carlyle,' says
Browning of his translation of Agamemnon, ‘and rewarded will it
indeed become if I am permitted to dignify it by the prefatory
insertion of his dear and noble name. ' John Forster and William
Macready were also added at this time to the group of Browning's
friends, and his acquaintance with the latter had, for a time, an
important bearing upon his work.
In Pauline and Paracelsus, it has been well said, Browning
had 'analysed rather than exhibited character. The soul, the
one thing' which he thought 'worth knowing,' was the psycho-
logist's abstract entity, little more than a stage occupied successively
by moods and passions: it was not the concrete, complex self,
veined and blood-tinctured. Moreover (which signifies much),
all its history fell within itself, and external circumstance, instead
of furnishing it with the material out of which character is hewn,
was but decoration,' to use Browning's own phrase, and was
purposely put into the background. These two poems were thus
justly called “confessional': they were subjective and self-conscious.
No sooner was Paracelsus finished than Browning contemplated
another 'soul-history. In it, once more, a greatly aspiring soul
was to recognise, only at the last moment and after much ‘apparent
failure,' the mission which could save, fitting to the finite his infinity.
The story that he wished to tell was Sordello.
But the material was stubborn as well as rich, and it resisted
easy and early mastery. Possibly, also, the 'confessional' mood
was passing. In any case, Browning, who was always and almost
solely interested in human character, was thinking of depicting
character in action. He was eager, as he said in his preface to
Strafford, 'to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy
natures of a grand epoch. ' Browning's mind, no doubt, was
turned to Strafford by Forster, who, with some help from Browning,
had written the great statesman's life. But it was at a supper
given by Talfourd to celebrate the first performance of Ion
that Macready, to whom Browning had already spoken of his
intention of writing a tragedy, said 'Write a play, Browning, and
keep me from going to America. ' Strafford, which was the result
6
6
## p. 59 (#75) ##############################################
111]
Strafford
59
1
of the request, was acted at Covent garden theatre on 1 May 1837
-Macready appearing as Strafford and Helen Faucit as lady
Carlisle. Its stage history was brief. It was not damned on
''
the first night, but just escaped; it was applauded on the second ;
and it died an unnatural death after the fifth. It was betrayed :
the player who acted Pym refusing 'to save England even once
more,' and Browning vowing that 'never again would he write
a play! '
The tragical element in the play is the collision of the two
loyalties—that of Strafford to the king and that of Pym to Eng-
land : and the tragedy borrows its intensity from the fact that the
king whom Strafford loves will not save him, and that Pym, who
loves Strafford, sends him to his death. Pym 'was used to stroll
with him, arm locked in arm,' and, in early days, had even read the
same needs in England's face, while
Eliot's brow grew broad with noble thoughts.
The atmosphere of the play is that of'a thorough self-devotement,
self-forgetting. The characters are all simple, and apt to be always
in one condition of mind. They have a generous magnitude and
strength and vigour; but they are too consistently in a state of
exaltation, inclined to be declamatory and self-conscious and to be
always expounding the movements of their own minds. Indeed,
not one of Browning's characters in any of his plays fairly comes
out into the open air and on the high road, except, perhaps,
Pippa.
In the preface to Strafford, Browning says that 'he had for
some time been engaged on a Poem of a very different nature,
when induced to make the present attempt. ' This poem, as already
hinted, was Sordello, Browning's second study of a poetic soul,
but a soul, this time, caught in the context of large and imperious
circumstance and quite unlike Aprile.
Many have explained Sordello, and some have comprehended
it. It is uncompromisingly and irretrievably difficult reading.
No historical account of the conflicts of Ghibelline and Guelph,
no expository annotation of any kind, not even its own wealth of
luminous ideas or splendour of Italian city scenes and solitudes,
can justify it entirely as a work of art. We may render its main
plot in simple terms: how Sordello, endowed with powers that
might have made him the Apollo of his people and victorious in
a contest of song over Eglamor, his poetic foil, finds, unexpectedly,
eminent station and political power within his grasp, but gains a
## p. 60 (#76) ##############################################
60
[
Robert and Elizabeth Browning (CH.
a
victory of another kind, rising superior to the temptation doubly
urged by the Ghibelline captain and the beauty of Parma; how the
double victory has still left him a dabbler and loiterer, a Hamlet
in both poetry and politics; how, clinging to his ideal, the cause of
humanity, but failing to make it dominant over his ‘finite' world,
he dies under the strain of choice. ' But no simplification of the
story suffices. It is dark from the very intensity and multiplicity
of the playing cross-lights ; for the main ideas are reflected in-
numerably from the countless facets of the facts which the poet
displays in confusingly rapid succession. Brilliancy, swiftness of
movement, the sudden exclamation made to convey a complex
thought, the crowded intrusion of parenthetical antecedents, the
elision of connecting relatives-such are the characteristics which
make it difficult to decipher.
It is no wonder that the appearance of Sordello, in 1840,
destroyed the somewhat timid promise of public favour which
Paracelsus had brought to the poet. We are told that the 'gentle
literary public of those days had found Sartor Resartus un-
intelligible, and frankly turned away from Browning. But the
suggested comparison is misleading and the criticism is unfair.
The difficulties of Sartor have disappeared with the new times
which Carlyle introduced ; those of Sordello will stay so long as
the mental structure of men remains the same.
'I blame no one,' said Browning, 'least of all myself, who did
my best then and since. ' It was in no perverse mood of intellectual
pride or of scorn for the public mind that he wrote Sordello. His
error was, rather, the opposite. "Freighted full of music,' crowded
with the wealth of his detailed knowledge, rapt with the splendour
of his poetic visions, he, in the simplicity of his heart, forgot his
public so completely as to assume, as a matter of course, that his
readers were able to wing their flight at his side.
There are evidences that the experience was painful and that
its effects lasted. In The Ring and the Book, and elsewhere, there
is, in the resolute simplification of the narrative and the painful
iteration, a clue to the effect of the failure of Sordello upon his
workmanship. Both as he entered upon and as he closed that
greatest of all his poetic adventures, there is a hint of a challenge
and a touch of reproof, and even scorn, of the British Public,'
6
a
ye who like me not,
(God love you!
)—whom I yet have laboured for,
Perchance more careful whoso runs may read
Than erst when all, it seemed, could read who ran.
## p. 61 (#77) ##############################################
111]
Bells and Pomegranates
61
6
6
But it is time to turn to the outward events of this period of
Browning's life. These were his journey to Italy and the removal
of the family to Hatcham. He started for Italy on Good Friday
1838, travelling as sole passenger on a merchantman. On the
voyage, he wrote the glorious story of the ride from Ghent to Aix,
and Home Thoughts from the Sea. One of his objects was to
gather materials for Sordello; but he harvested much more from
his visit. It was, for him, 'a time of enchantment. ' He saw Asolo
and Venice and Padua ; he visited mountain solitudes, and he
brought home a passionate and enduring love for Italy. Italian
themes were, henceforth, to be favourites of his imagination, and
his life in that country was, for many years to come, to saturate
his experience.
At the time when Browning was going to begin the finishing
of Sordello,' as he wrote to Miss Haworth, he was also beginning
‘thinking a Tragedy. ' He had still another tragedy in prospect, he
tells us, and wrote best so provided. The two tragedies were King
Victor and King Charles and The Return of the Druses. He was
also occupied with what was not strictly a play, but a new poetic
form—a series of scenes connected together like pearls on a silken
thread by the magic influence of the little silk-winder of Asolo—the
exquisitely beautiful and simple Pippa Passes. The plays were
written with the view of being acted; but Macready's refusal kept
them back, for a time, and they were published. They appeared
in a series of what may be called poetical pamphlets, issued between
1841 and 1846, which undoubtedly constituted as remarkable
literary merchandise as was ever offered to any public. This plan
of publication was suggested by Moxon, and was intended to
popularise the poet's works by selling them cheaply. They were
at first sold at sixpence. But (among other hindrances) they
were called Bells and Pomegranates, and it was only at the close
of the series and on the instigation of Elizabeth Barrett that
Browning explained to the puzzled readers how it was intended
by this reference to the hem of the robe of the high priest' to
indicate the mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense,
poetry with thought,' which the pamphlets were. Moreover,
literary critics had not forgotten or forgiven Sordello, and literary
prejudice is stubborn stuff. Even Pippa Passes, the first of the
series, had a reluctant and frigid reception. A generously apprecia-
tive article, in The Eclectic Review, in 1849, mentions it along with
Sordello as one of the poems against which the loudest complaints
of obscurity have been raised. '
## p. 62 (#78) ##############################################
62
[ch.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
6
Nothing that Browning ever wrote was better fitted than
Pippa Passes to arrest the public attention. It was as novel in
charm as it was in form. Pippa herself, it has been suggested",
is Browning's Ariel-a magic influence in the magic isle of man's
world. The little silk-winder, walking along the streets of Asolo
on her 'one day in the year' and fancying herself to be, in turn,
each of its 'Four Happiest Ones,' pours forth her lyric soul in song.
The songs striking into the world of passions, plots and crimes, in
which the 'Four Happiest Ones' were involved, arrest, cleanse and
transform. She is as charming as the lyrics she carols. Elizabeth
Barrett . could find in her heart to envy the Author,' and Pippa
was Browning's own favourite among the creations of his early
manhood. She has "crept into the study of imagination' of all
his readers ever since.
Pippa Passes was followed, in 1842, by King Victor and
King Charles, and that tragedy, in turn, by a collection of some
sixteen short pieces, which were called Dramatic Lyrics. Then,
in 1843, appeared The Return of the Druses, written some years
earlier, and two other plays —A Blot in the 'Scutcheon and
Colombe's Birthday (published in 1844). These were followed
by another collection of short poems, on the greatest variety of
subjects, entitled Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. 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
## p. 63 (#79) ##############################################
] III
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,
6
## p. 64 (#80) ##############################################
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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
