No More Learning

' The moods to which Tennyson has given poetic
expression are as varied as his metres, and include a rare feeling
for the beauty of English scenery, the mind of the peasant in many


## p. 45 (#61) ##############################################

] II
His Achievement
45
of its phases, humorous and tragic, the interpretation of classical
legend, the reproduction of the very soul of some Greek and Roman
poets, as Theocritus and Vergil, Lucretius and Catullus, the colour
and beauty, if not all the peculiar ethical and religious tone, of
medieval romance, complexities of mind and even pathological
subtleties of emotion, the brooding of a sensitive spirit over
the riddles of life and death and good and evil. Browning has
a wider range, is less insular, more curious about exotic types
and more subtle in tracing the dialectics of mood and situation.
But he does not enter more intensely into the purely emotional
aspect of the mood, and he does not steep the whole in such a
wealth of colour and melody.
Coming after the great romantics, Tennyson inherited their
achievement in the rediscovery of poetic themes, the purification and
enrichment of English poetic diction, the liberation and enrichment
of English verse, and he uses them all as a conscious, careful artist.
His poetry stands to theirs much as a garden to a natural landscape.
The free air of passionate inspiration does not blow through
it so potently; it lacks the sublimity of sea and moor and the open
heavens. But there are compensations. The beauty of nature is
enhanced by art, the massing of blooms, the varying of effects,
the background of velvet lawn and grassy bank and ordered hedge-
row; above all, by the enrichment of the soil which adds a deeper
crimson to the rose, and blends with simpler blooms the splendours
of the exotic. An imagination rich in colour, a delicate and highly
trained ear, a thought which if not profound was nourished on the
literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome—these were among
Tennyson's gifts to English poetry, and they go a long way to
counterbalance such limitations as are to be found in his thought
and feeling. The peerage conferred on him in 1884 was the
recognition of the greatness of his reputation and the intensely
national spirit of his work.
The name Tennyson may have overshadowed for a time,
in the long run it has given an adventitious interest to, the
work of the poet laureate's brothers, Frederick and Charles.
Frederick went from Louth grammar school to Eton, and from
Eton to Cambridge, where, after a year at St John's college,
he migrated to Trinity where he was joined by his brothers.
He distinguished himself by gaining the Browne medal with a
Greek ode on Egypt. The cadence of the closing lines lingered in
the ears of Sir Francis Doyle all his life: oλλυμένων γάρ, α χθών


## p. 46 (#62) ##############################################

46
[CH.
The Tennysons
6
>
è čaroleitai! But he did not make so strong an impression on
his contemporaries as the younger brothers. The greater part of
his subsequent life was spent in Italy, and the last thirty-five
years in Jersey. At Florence, he came under the influence of
the spiritualistic influences which attracted Mrs Browning and
gave the world Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium'; and in his later
life he became an ardent Freemason and Swedenborgian. He
was a great reader, a student of art and a passionate lover of
music. His first volume of poems Days and Hours was published
in 1854. Thereafter, he published nothing until 1890, when he
issued a long volume of blank verse idylls called The Isles of
Greece, followed, in 1891, by a volume of classical stories, Daphne
and other Poems, and, in 1895, under the title of Poems of the
Day and Year, a selection from the earlier printed poems with
some additions.
Charles Tennyson graduated at Cambridge in 1832 and was
ordained in 1835. On succeeding to a small estate by the will of
a grand-uncle he took the name of Turner. The greater part
of his life was spent as vicar at Grasby in Lincolnshire, where he
cultivated his delicate, meditative verse, writing sonnets on inci-
dents in his daily life, public events, theological topics and other
subjects. He died at Cheltenham in 1879.
Charles Tennyson's poems, with few exceptions, were sonnets,
in the Italian form, but with a fresh set of rimes in the second
quartet of the octave. Fifty were published in 1830 and were
added to, as occasion suggested, till Sonnets, Old and New,
published in 1880, numbered more than three hundred. Not
many of this number reveal the intensity of feeling and per-
fection of form which are essential to the sonnet. Coleridge was
attracted by the young Tennyson's sonnets, as, at an earlier
age, he had been by the not very dissimilar sonnets of Bowles
with their pensive sentiment and occasionally felicitous description.
But, when at his best, Tennyson-Turner is a finer artist than Bowles.
Some of the earlier, indeed, show an uncertain grasp of the form,
the last lines betraying an heroic effort to complete the fourteen
and finish. He wrote too many on occasional themes and
theological polemics. But the best of those inspired by aspects
of natural scenery and simple incidents have the charm of
felicitous workmanship and delicate feeling. The Lattice at
Sunrise, The Buoy-Bell, The Ocean and some others suggest
Wordsworth in a minor key, and Letty's Globe, like the grander
sonnet of Blanco White, is a poem in which art and chance
a


## p. 47 (#63) ##############################################

11]
Frederick Tennyson
47
seem to have combined to produce a poem surprisingly felicitous
alike in conceit and execution.
If Charles Tennyson is a pleasing lesser poet, Frederick strikes
one as a poet in whom the possibility of greater things was never
realised. His character and occasional lines in his work impressed
FitzGerald, who, after 1842, was never a whole-hearted admirer of
the poet laureate's work. “You are now the only man I expect
verse from,' he wrote to Frederick in 1850, “such gloomy, grand
stuff as you write. . . we want some bits of strong, genuine imagina-
tion’; and Browning spoke of him as possessing all the qualities of
his brother Alfred, but in solution. 'One always expected them to
crystallise—but they never did. '
There is certainly more of the large manner about him than
Charles. His imagery, especially his personifications, is more
imaginative; his verse has more of sweep and flow. But he
never took to heart, as Alfred did, the lesson of brevity: 'I felt
certain of one thing then, if I meant to make any mark at all it
must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse. '
Frederick's classical idylls and narratives are excessively diffuse.
They contain some of his best work, charming description, tender-
ness of feeling-passion they lack as, in some degree, does the
work of all the Tennysons. There is none that would not have
gained by concentration of treatment.
The other notable quality of Frederick Tennyson's poems,
longer and shorter, is a certain abstractness. His love of travel
and a life apart were the index to a certain aloofness and soli-
tariness of soul, not incompatible with a desire for sympathy and
self-expression. Some stanzas called River of Life close with a
confession of this aloofness :
.
River of Life, lo! I have furld my sail
Under the twilight of these ancient trees,
I listen to the water's sleepless wail,
I fill mine ears with sighs that never cease,
If armed hearts come stronger out of ill,
The dust of conflict fills their eyes and ears;
Mine unaccustom'd heart will tremble still
With the old mirth and with the early tears.
He was deeply interested in metaphysical problems. He retells
old myths with the purpose of making them messengers of
his own thought on immortality and the unseen world. But the
message is a little indistinct. Occasionally, as in Psyche, he loses
himself in a Swedenborgian quagmire. There was something of
a mystic in Frederick Tennyson; and his strange, unequal poems


## p. 48 (#64) ##############################################

48
[CH. II
The Tennysons
are the expression of a solitary soul with a certain distinction
of its own.
Nature and love and death and immortality are the
foci round which his thought, as that of his greater brother, moved,
and on each he has written occasional haunting lines :
Oh! thou must weep, and, in the rain
Of tears, raise up the prime
And beauty of thy heart again,
And toil, and fall with time;
And look on Fate, and bear to see
The shadow of Death familiarly.
Thy noblest act is but a sorrow,
To live-though ill befall;
Thy great reward-to die to-morrow,
If God and Nature call;
In faith to reach what ear and eye
Dream not, nor all thy phantasy!


## p. 49 (#65) ##############################################

CHAPTER III
ROBERT BROWNING
AND
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
The best explanation of a poet is to be sought in the best
poem he has written, or in that theme which, at his touch, breaks
out into the amplest music. There, his very self, the personality
which he verily is and which, in a greater or lesser degree, subtly
suffuses all that he does, finds fittest and fullest utterance; and the
utterance itself, whether in phrase or figure, being faithful to fact,
bears that stamp of inevitability which implies perfection.
There is little doubt as to the theme which called forth the
fullness of the powers of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
It was love. It was love in the same cosmic sense as Wordsworth's
duty, which ‘kept the stars from wrong,' an omnipresent passion for
the best in all nature and in all mankind. To Elizabeth Browning,
there was no truth nor substance, save love. It was the essence
and wholeness of her being, and it expressed itself with unre-
strained prodigality in Sonnets from the Portuguese. Everything
in her life that went before--the beauty of her early home among
the Malverns, the whole practice of her literary industry, the long
lone years of illness and weakness, the heavy sorrow of the death-
stricken home-is taken up, sanctified and dedicated in these poems;
and everything that was to follow was but harvest-gleaning and
aftermath. These sonnets, and, one is tempted to say, these sonnets
only, of all that Elizabeth Browning wrote, the world will in no
wise let go. They are equalled only by her life-in Milton's
sense, they are her life.
Robert Browning cannot be so easily summed and surveyed.
His skill was multifarious far beyond the wont even of great
poets. There was hardly an instrument in the orchestra which
he could not play, his touch was always unique and recognisable;
and, within the domain of human character, there was hardly a
1 Areopagitica.
4
E. L. XIII.
CH. III.


## p. 50 (#66) ##############################################

50
[ch.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
9
bent or trait, a passion or propensity, which he did not celebrate.
Nevertheless, when, like his Arion, he 'gathers his greatness round
him,' and 'stands in state,' and 'harp and voice rend air' with his
full 'magnificence of song! ,' the theme is almost certain to be some
phase of love. And love had the same cosmic, constitutive character
to him, the same, or even greater, moral worth and spiritual
splendour. Speaking of Sonnets from the Portuguese, a critic
has observed with truth that
as pieces of poetry they are not equal to the sonnets of Wordsworth or of
Milton, yet it is not so unreasonable to question whether their removal would
not leave a more irreparable gap in literature 2.
The removal of love from among Browning's themes would be,
original as he was in everything, the removal of his most original,
as well as his most massively valuable, contribution to our literature.
It would have left the poet himself a man without a purpose in
a universe without meaning. Love, in the last resort, was the only
article in his creed. For these reasons, the convergence of these
two lives into unity and their most intimate commingling ever after,
have an artistic meaning no less than an ethical interest, and they
concern the literary critic not less than the biographer. Not that
either of the two poets, when their 'prentice days were over,
was content to be imitative, or could possibly be conceived as
moving in the other's manner. There was no sacrifice of inde-
pendence—there never is when the union is spiritual in character
and complete. They even took precautions against influencing
one another when a poem was in the making. 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


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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
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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


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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.


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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. '


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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
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] 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


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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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&
111]
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.