Chapter 12

THE POET.

Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss-- Another Boehme with a tougher book And subtler meanings of what roses say,-- Or some stout Mage, like him of Halberstadt, John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about? He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,

* * * * *

Buries us with a glory, young once more, Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

--_Transcendentalism_.

I.

"I have, you are to know," Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth, "such a love for flowers and leaves ... that I every now and then in an impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,--bite them to bits." "All poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin, "is the problem of putting the infinite into the finite." Utterances like these, not conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work. "Finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally fundamental springs of feeling and thought. Each had its stronghold in a particular psychical region. The province and feeding-ground of his passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness which he so vividly described in _Pauline_, seeking to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet retain the law of his own being. "I pluck the rose and love it more than tongue can speak," says the lover in _Two in the Campagna_. Browning had his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the "finite" is not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the "infinite,"--that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their _points d'appui_ in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without "incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted with "the infinite," as the inferior,--as something _soi-disant_ imperfect and incomplete,--its actual status and function in Browning's imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's peras in relation to the apeiron,--the saving "limit" which gives definite existence to the limitless vague.

II.

Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his predecessors, a thorough realist in method. All the Romantic poets of the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to the transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out of sympathy with civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the types of men it bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. "Barbarian," as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent gift of imagination never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and "artificial" elements of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic occupations. It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome, "intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic work.

While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said "Yes" to many sides of existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had some very definite limitations of his own. He gathered into his verse crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore. Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit place in his poetry. To the eternal beauty of myth and folk-lore,--dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for ever,"--all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. "Fairy-poetry," he agreed with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was "impossible in the days of steam." With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of _Gerard de Lairesse_ at one end of his career, or of the vision of _Paracelsus_ at the other, or _Childe Roland_ in the middle, can mistake the capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional _tour de force_; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day. "A poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don Juan, "we prose folk always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of Browning's poetic world,--the world of prose illuminated through and through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous of exploring intellects.

In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and _savoir faire_. The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the talents which put men _en rapport_ with their kind. The reader of his biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the poet _par excellence_ of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of _Prospice_, though it may have underlain all his other moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only sphere, did not wish

"the wings unfurled That sleep in the worm, they say."

Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much. His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the "sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm. The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space--relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle. There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "Why, sir, you are quite a geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its natural outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time thrust poetry into the shade. "The more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted and been happy--no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a lifetime of trying at the lock.

[Footnote 62: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 24.]

[Footnote 63: Mrs Browning's _Letters_, March 1861.]

III.

And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for Browning's art. If his keen objective senses penned his imagination, save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of choice. The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed, and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed. It is possible to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told. He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,--feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic. In each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul, Browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination, controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work. To trace these operations in detail will be the occupation of the five following sections.

IV.

1. JOY IN LIGHT AND COLOUR.

Browning's repute as a thinker and "teacher" long overshadowed his glory as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his bold and splendid colouring. It is true that he is never a colourist pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean. Poets so great as Keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their own feasts of sense; Browning has rather the air of a magnificent dispenser, who "provides and not partakes." His colouring is not subtle; it recalls neither the æthereal opal of Shelley nor the dewy flushing glow and "verdurous glooms" of Keats, nor the choice and cultured splendour of Tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense. He neglects the indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature, or the tender "silvery-grey" of Andrea's placid perfection. He dazzles us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that he fell the more readily upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet," and the "Bells" "of gold"? He loves the daybreak hour of the world's awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze of the Italian mid-day--

"Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps That triumph at the heels of June the god."

Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle, Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse, with Sordello's Palma, whose

"tresses curled Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound About her like a glory! even the ground Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;"

and the girl in _Love among the Ruins_, and the "dear dead women" of Venice. His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its sources in his love of light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And, like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, as in _Pan and Luna_, the blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. And even night itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision, breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic and blackest of all."

[Footnote 64: "I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter, recently published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (_A. de Vere: A Memoir_, by Wilfrid Ward).]

[Footnote 65: _Two Poets of Croisic_.]

But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. He sees the "old June weather" blue above, and the

"great opaque Blue breadth of sea without a break"

under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern Italy, "where the baked cicala dies of drouth"; and the blue lilies about the harp of golden-haired David; and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb";[66] and the "gaze of Apollo" through the gloom of Verona woods;[67] he sees the American pampas--"miles and miles of gold and green," "where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow," with a horse--"coal-black"--careering across it; and his swarthy Ethiop uses the yellow poison-wattles of a lizard to divine with.[68] If he imagines the "hairy-gold orbs" of the sorb-fruit, they must be ensconced in "black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in texture as in hue;[69] and he neglects the mellow harmonies of autumnal decay in order to paint the leaf which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across the flame of a golden shield.[70] He makes the most of every hint of contrast he finds, and delights in images which accentuate the rigour of antithesis; Cleon's mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated pavement, and Blougram's fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board. And when, long after the tragic break-up of his Italian home, he reverted in thought to Miss Blagden's Florentine garden, the one impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,--"the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[71]

[Footnote 66: _Popularity_.]

[Footnote 67: _Sordello_.]

[Footnote 68: Ibid.]

[Footnote 69: _Englishman in Italy_.]

[Footnote 70: _By the Fireside_.]

[Footnote 71: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 258.]

Browning's colouring is thus strikingly expressive of the build of his mind, as sketched above. It is the colouring of a realist in so far as it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical. But it is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and imagination--the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict.

V.

2. JOY IN FORM.

If the popular legend of Browning ignores his passion for colour, it altogether scouts the suggestion that he had a peculiar delight in form. By general consent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention to it. No doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself. His ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in literature. If we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with even morbid excess. Alike in life and in art he hated sloth,--the slovenliness of the "ungirt loin" and of the indecisive touch. In conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious propriety. The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin in genius to the high priests of the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined exuberance of his joy in form. An acute criticism of Mrs Browning's--in some points the very best critic he ever had--puts one aspect of this admirably. _The Athenæum_ had called him "misty." "Misty," she retorts, "is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. You never are misty, not even in _Sordello_--never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always,--and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form producing obscurity. But through immense tracts of Browning the effect of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. Yet he is no more a realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring. His deep sharp lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite bias of eye and brain. Sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part here also. As he loved the intense colours which most vigorously stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of the muscles of the eye. He caught at the edges of things--the white line of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare whiteness as no other poet ever did to "the bitten lip of hate." He once saw with delight "a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole."[73] Browning's joy in form was as little epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which the sense of motion and energy had the largest part. Smooth, flowing, rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check, are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of continuity. His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]--"one gloom, a rift of fire, another gloom,"--the brilliant line of Venice suspended "between blue and blue." "Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves--all that I love heartily," he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men's senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine" intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf needles." And who else would have thought of saying that "the fields look _rough_ with hoary dew"?[78] In the _Easter-Day_ vision he sees the sky as a network of black serrated ridges. He loves the intricate play of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old lion's cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "Turkish verse along a scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers, and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,--such things are the familiar commonplace of Browning's sculpturesque fancy. His metrical movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects--verse-rhythm and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to coincide.[80]

[Footnote 72: _E.B. to R.B._, Jan. 19, 1846.]

[Footnote 73: _To E.B.B._, Jan. 5, 1846.]

[Footnote 74: _By the Fireside_.]

[Footnote 75: _Old Pictures in Florence_.]

[Footnote 76: _Sordello_, i. 181.]

[Footnote 77: Jan. 5, 1846, apropos of a poem by Horne. The "love" may refer to Horne's description of these things, but it matters little for the present purpose.]

[Footnote 78: _Home Thoughts_.]

[Footnote 79: _Karshish_, i. 515. Cf. _Englishman in Italy_, i. 397.]

[Footnote 80: Cf., _e.g._, his treatment of the six-line stanza.]

Nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low-relief. Every rift in the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it. Sordello's palace is "a maze of corridors,"--"dusk winding stairs, dim galleries." He probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and scent that lie within the "loaded curls" of his lady, and irradiates the lizard, or the gnome,[81] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber drop,[82] or in its bud,[83] the worm in its clod. When Keats describes the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is content with the loveliness he sees:--

"And still she slept an _azure-lidded_ sleep."

Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead Porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." A cleft is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's. In a cleft of the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85] strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct allures him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which something else explores and occupies,--the image of the sheath; the image of the cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient, kind of angularity. Beside the Calabrian seaside house stands a "sharp tree--a cypress--rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted,"--in all points a thoroughly Browningesque tree.

[Footnote 81: _Sordello_.]

[Footnote 82: This turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with Donne; cf. _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 46: "Music should enwrap the thought, as Donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee."]

[Footnote 83: _Porphyria_.]

[Footnote 84: _De Gustibus_.]

[Footnote 85: _Pan and Luna_.]

[Footnote 86: E.g., _Balaustion's Adventure_; Proem.]

And so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of sheaths and cups, a not less prolific family of _spikes_ and _wedges_ and _swords_ runs riot in Browning's work. The rushing of a fresh river-stream into the warm ocean tides crystallises into the "crystal spike between two warm walls of wave;"[87] "air thickens," and the wind, grown solid, "edges its wedge in and in as far as the point would go."[88] The fleecy clouds embracing the flying form of Luna clasp her as close "as dented spine fitting its flesh."[89] The fiery agony of John the heretic is a plucking of sharp spikes from his rose.[90] Lightning is a bright sword, plunged through the pine-tree roof. And Mont Blanc himself is half effaced by his "earth-brood" of aiguilles,--"needles red and white and green, Horns of silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne."[91]

[Footnote 87: _Caliban on Setebos_.]

[Footnote 88: _A Lover's Quarrel_.]

[Footnote 89: _Pan and Luna_.]

[Footnote 90: _The Heretic's Tragedy_.]

[Footnote 91: _La Saisiaz_.]

Browning's joy in abrupt and intricate form had then a definite root in his own nervous and muscular energy. It was no mere preference which might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things. In this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, Browning's romantic hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the matter it conveyed. Abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man from God; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something, not transcending and comprehending the finite, but _beginning where the finite stopped_,--Eternity at the end of Time. But the same imaginative passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction. Browning's divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not "interfused" with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but permeating it through and through, "curled inextricably round about" all its beauty and its power,[92] "intertwined" with earth's lowliest existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life. The doctrine of God's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with Browning's generation. Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle and by that of Emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme Good all the labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle impatiently suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which Emerson's ideality ignored.

[Footnote 92: _Easter-Day_, xxx.]

VI.

3. JOY IN POWER.

Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than a feaster upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he wrote in the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it remained firmly rooted to the last. As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere, and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power. If he later "saw Love as plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional, aspect of Love which caught his eye. His sense of Power played a yet more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense of form. But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars.

[Footnote 93: _Asolando: Reverie._]

No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning. His associates tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts.

[Footnote 94: Mr E. Gosse, in _Dict. of N.B._]

"Who were the stragglers, what war did they wage; Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash?"

he asks in _Childe Roland_,--altogether an instructive example of the ways of Browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a deliberately fantastic theme. Hear again with what savage joy his Moon "rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley's Moon, in keeping with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely _broke its woof_. So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard "the vines writhe in rows each impaled on its stake."

His "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart which they result from or produce. And his clefts are as incomplete without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their embrace.[95] His mountains--so rarely the benign pastoral presences of Wordsworth--are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn and mutilated them,--they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and "wind-gashed." When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and "entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and intertwined limbs. Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch of Hildebrand in _Sordello_:--

"See him stand Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply As in a forge; ... teeth clenched, The neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched, As if a cloud enveloped him while fought Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought At deadlock."[97]

[Footnote 95: Cf. _Prometheus Unbound_, passim.]

[Footnote 96: _Saul_.]

[Footnote 97: _Sordello_, i. 171.]

When the hoary cripple in _Childe Roland_ laughs, his mouth-edge is "pursed and scored" with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be uttered, but _written_ with his crutch "in the dusty thoroughfare." This idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied oak, cleft like "a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death." Later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it "tangled in a dead man's hair or beard." Similarly, Browning is habitually lured into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or shredded,--as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes: Akiba,--

"the comb Of iron carded, flesh from bone, away,"[98]

or Hippolytus, ruined on the "detested beach" that was "bright with blood and morsels of his flesh."[99]

[Footnote 98: _Joch. Halk._]

[Footnote 99: _Artemis Prol._]

This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds. By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of musicians _par excellence_, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings, of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation mated with barbarism, "like Jove in a thatched house."

Music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its intricate technique; as the mine from which Abt Vogler reared his palace, the loom on which Master Hugues wove the intertwining harmonies of his fugue. But the most dulcet harmony aroused him less surely to vivacious expression than some "gruff hinge's invariable scold,"[100] or the quick sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,[101] or the hoof-beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of the old organist, in fancy, down the "rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs" of his lightless loft. There was much in him of his own Hamelin rats' alacrity of response to sounds "as of scraping tripe" and squeezing apples, and the rest. Milton contrasted the harmonious swing of the gates of Paradise with the harsh grinding of the gates of hell. Browning would have found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his zest for other forms of robust malignity.

[Footnote 100: _Christmas Eve_, i. 480.]

[Footnote 101: _Englishman in Italy_, i. 396.]

And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in savage words. He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. Both poets found their good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force. Dante, in a famous chapter of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_[102] laid down a fourfold distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and roughness,--to prefer the "combed" and the "shaggy" to the "tousled" and the "sleek." All four kinds had their function in the versatile technique of Browning and Tennyson; but it is safe to say that while Tennyson's vocabulary is focussed among the "combed" in the direction of the "sleek," Browning's centres in the "shaggy," verging towards the "tousled."[103] The utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias; but

"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee,"

though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like

"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

[Footnote 102: _De Vulg. Eloq._, ii. 8.]

[Footnote 103: Making allowance, of course, for the more "shaggy" and "tousled" character of the English vocabulary as a whole, compared with Italian.]

Browning's genial violence continually produced strokes which only needed a little access of oddity or extravagance to become grotesque. He probably inherited a bias in this direction; we know that his father delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even "declared that he could not draw a pretty face."[104] But his grotesqueness is never the mere comic oddness which sometimes assumes the name. It is a kind of monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, but by a riot of exuberant power. And he has also a grave and tragic use of the grotesque, in which he stands alone. He is, in fact, by far the greatest English master of grotesque. _Childe Roland_, where the natural bent of his invention has full fling, abounds with grotesque traits which, instead of disturbing the romantic atmosphere, infuse into it an element of strange, weird, and uncanny mirth, more unearthly than any solemnity; the day shooting its grim red leer across the plain, the old worn-out horse with its red, gaunt, and colloped neck a-strain; or, in _Paracelsus_, the "Cyclops-like" volcanoes "staring together with their eyes on flame," in whose "uncouth pride" God tastes a pleasure. Shelley had recoiled from the horrible idea of a host of these One-eyed monsters;[105] Browning deliberately invokes it. But he can use grotesque effects to heighten tragedy as well as romance. One source of the peculiar poignancy of the _Heretic's Tragedy_ is the eerie blend in it of mocking familiarity and horror.

[Footnote 104: H. Corkran, _Celebrities and I_.]

[Footnote 105: Cf. Locock, _Examination of the Shelley MSS. in the Bodleian_, p. 19. At the words "And monophalmic (_sic_) Polyphemes who haunt the pine-hills, flocked," the writing becomes illegible and the stanza is left incomplete. Mr Forman explains the breaking-off in the same way.]

Yet it was not always in this brutal and violent guise that Browning imagined power. He was "ever a fighter," and had a sense as keen as Byron's, and far more joyous, for storm and turbulence; but he had also, as Byron had not, the finer sense which feels the universe tense with implicit energies, and the profoundest silences of Nature oppressive with the burden of life straining to the birth. The stars in _Saul_ "beat with emotion" and "shot out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge," and a "gathered intensity" is "brought to the grey of the hills"; upon the lovers of _In a Balcony_ evening comes "intense with yon first trembling star." Wordsworth's "quiet" is lonely, pensive, and serene; his stars are not beating with emotion, but "listening quietly." Browning's is hectic, bodeful, high-strung. The vast featureless Campagna is instinct with "passion," and its "peace with joy."[106]

"Quietude--that's a universe in germ-- The dormant passion needing but a look To burst into immense life."[107]

[Footnote 106: _Two in the Campagna._]

[Footnote 107: _Asolando: Inapprehensiveness_.]

Half the romantic spell of _Childe Roland_ lies in the wonderful suggestion of impending catastrophe. The gloom is alive with mysterious and impalpable menace; the encompassing presences which everything suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more oppressively real, until the decisive moment when Roland's blast suddenly lets them loose.

For the power that Browning rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it found, and sharply marking off the future from the past. The same bias of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies of the world before his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe. His geology neglects the æons of gradual stratification; it is not the slow stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Paracelsian God. He is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud "bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree breaking, some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom born in a night. The "metamorphoses of plants,"[108] which fascinated Goethe by their inner continuity, arrest Browning by their outward abruptness: that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of much less worth for him than that the bud suddenly passes into something so unlike it as the flower. The gradual coming on of spring among the mountains concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic sublimity,--that in which the mountain unlooses its year's load of sound, and

"Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet."[109]

[Footnote 108: _Metamorphose der Pflanzen_.]

[Footnote 109: _Saul_.]

Even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a pregnant instant in which day dies:--

"For note, when evening shuts, A certain moment cuts The deed off, calls the glory from the grey."

Hence his love of images which convey these sudden transformations,--the worm, putting forth in autumn its "two wondrous winglets,"[110] the "transcendental platan," breaking into foliage and flower at the summit of its smooth tall bole; the splendour of flame leaping from the dull fuel of gums and straw. In such images we see how the simple joy in abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all vital and significant becoming. For Browning's trenchant imagination things were not gradually evolved; a sudden touch loosed the springs of latent power, or an overmastering energy from without rushed in like a flood. With all his connoisseur's delight in technique, language and sound were only spells which unlocked a power beyond their capacity to express. Music was the "burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night," starting up miraculously from the barren wilderness of mechanical expedients,[111] and poetry "the sudden rose"[112] "breaking in" at the bidding of a "brace of rhymes." That in such transmutations Browning saw one of the most marvellous of human powers we may gather from the famous lines of _Abt Vogler_ already quoted:--

"And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star."

[Footnote 110: _Sordello_ (Works, i. 123).]

[Footnote 111: _Fifine_, xlii.]

[Footnote 112: _Transcendentalism_.]

VII.

4. JOY IN SOUL.

No saying of Browning's is more familiar than that in which he declared "incidents in the development of souls"[113] to be to him the supreme interest of poetry. The preceding sections of this chapter have sufficiently shown how far this formula was from exhausting the vital springs of Browning's work. "Little else" might be "worth study"; but a great many other things had captured those rich sensibilities, without which the "student's analytic zeal" might have devoured the poet. On the other hand, his supreme interest in "incidents in the development of souls" was something very different from the democratic enthusiasm for humanity, or the Wordsworthian joy in the "common tears and mirth" of "every village." The quiet routine existence of uneventful lives hardly touched him more than the placid quiescence of animal and vegetable existence; the commonplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rapture; the human "primrose by the river's brim," merely as one among a throng, was for him pretty much what it was to Peter Bell. There was no doubt a strain of pantheistic thought in Browning which logically involved a treatment of the commonplace as profoundly reverent as Wordsworth's own. But his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the universe did not prevent his turning away resolutely from regions of humanity, as of nature, for which his poetic alchemy provided no solvent. His poetic throne was not built on "humble truth"; and he, as little as his own Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible Naddo upon his verses as based "on man's broad nature," and having a "staple of common-sense."[114] The homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes and conditions of men, presented, _as_ embodiments of those classes and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art. In this point, human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,--of a Burns, a Wordsworth, a Millet, a Barnes,--but even of the fastidious author of _The Northern Farmer_. Once, in a moment of exaltation, at Venice, Browning had seen Humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and faded bit of Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future mistress of his art. The programme thus laid down was not, like Wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration.

[Footnote 113: Preface to _Sordello_, ed. 1863.]

[Footnote 114: _Sordello_, ii. 135.]

And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice. The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between men and women was a kindling theme. The names of husband, of wife, of lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about unconscious childhood is all but fled. Children--real children, naïve and inarticulate, like little Fortù--rarely appear in his verse, and those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. In its child pathos _The Pied Piper_--addressed to a child--stands all but alone among his works. His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and unattached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion, Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as work malignly upon their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls; Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father's house; Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of "the secret of the world," which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love.

More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in Browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the City or the State, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion, or choice. Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. Casa Guidi windows betrayed too much. Two great communities alone moved his imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a common spiritual ideal. And Browning puts the loftiest passion for Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth of a Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal cry of the solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer multitudinous murmur of the great mass. In his defining, isolating imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse.

Browning's interest in "soul" was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of human nature as such. But, on the other hand, human nature stood for too much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies was too keen, to allow him to relish, or make much use of, those unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,--the personified abstractions. Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, or in the lofty and noble form of Keats's "Autumn" and Shelley's "West Wind," this powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive and casual strokes to music by Browning's hand. Personality, to interest him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience. It had to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants. The stamp of fashioning intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns him off. He climbs to no Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no Empyrean. His rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground. His Artemis "prologizes" to, his Herakles plays a part in, a human drama; and both are as frankly human themselves as the gods of Homer. Shelley and Keats had rekindled about the faded forms of the Greek gods the elemental Nature-worship from which they had started; Apollo, Hyperion, are again glorious symbols of the "all-seeing" and all-vitalising Sun. Browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats their legends, with the easy rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a mine of ethical and psychological illustration. He can play charmingly, in later years, with the myth of Pan and Luna, of Arion and the dolphin,[115] or of Apollo and the Fates, but idyl gets the better of nature feeling; "maid-moon" Luna is far more maid than moon. The spirit of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for Keats, in some symbolic shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of _The Englishman in Italy_. The spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth in a Prometheus, but realised in a Caponsacchi.

[Footnote 115: _Fifine at the Fair_, lxxviii.]

VIII.

What, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life were the points of special attraction for Browning? To put it in a word, the same fundamental instincts of the senses and the imagination which we have watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally determined the complexion of its persons. The joy in pure and intense colour, in abruptness of line and intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and sudden disclosure and transformation,--all these characteristics have their analogies in Browning's feeling for the complexion, morphology, and dynamics of what he calls the soul. Just as this lover of crowded labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long procession of Browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure, intense, immaculate spiritual light,--Pippa, Pompilia, the David of the earlier _Saul_. Something of the strange charm of these naïvely beautiful beings springs from their isolation. That detachment from the bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness. They start into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw. Browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet of a kind of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness. Pippa would hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of Browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers,--the loneliness neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and serene. Wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as well as from their fellow-men. The little "H.C., six years old," is "a dewdrop which the morn brings forth," that

"at the touch of wrong, without a strife, Slips in a moment out of life."

Pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her roots in earth; she is not the dewdrop but the flower.

But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which seriously engaged Browning's imagination. His own intense isolating self-consciousness infused itself into them. Each is a little island kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely intelligible to the foreigner. Hence his persistent use of the dramatic monologue. Every man had his point of view, and his right to state his case. "Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour had its special truth and worth. His study of character is notoriously occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. His lovers miss the clue; if they find it, as in _By the Fireside_, the collapse of the barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked to explain it.

[Footnote 116: _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 6.]

And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "The care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in _Sordello_, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it. The abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not merely his agility of mind but his æsthetic relish for the Gothic richness and fretted intricacy that result. The bishop of St Praxed's monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,--anxious entreaty to his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph. The larger tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his "chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus, advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment." Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured by vivid moments,--the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through rifts and chinks. A moment of speech with Shelley stands out, a brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of Martin Relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive; the whole complex story of Pompilia focuses in the "splendid minute and no more" in which she is "saved"; the lover's whole life is summed up in "some moment's product" when "the soul declares itself,"[117] or utters the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was missed. "It once might have been, once only," is the refrain of the lover's regret in Browning, as "once and only once and for one only" is the keynote of his triumph. In the contours of event and circumstance, as in those of material objects, he loves jagged angularity, not harmonious curve. "Our interest's in the dangerous edge of things,"--

"The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist;"

where an alien strain violently crosses the natural course of kind; and these are only extreme examples of the abnormal nature which always allured and detained Browning's imagination, though it was not always the source of its highest achievement. Ivánovitch, executing justice under the forms of murder, Caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms of an elopement, the savagery of Halbert and Hob unnerved by an abrupt reminiscence,--it is in these suggestive and pregnant situations, at the meeting-points of apparently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that Browning habitually found or placed those of his characters who represent any class or kind at all.

[Footnote 117: _By the Fireside_.]

The exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of Browning's imagination equally left their vivid impress upon his treatment of character. If the sharp nodosities of character caught his eye, its mysterious recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity; this lover of "clefts," this pryer among tangled locks and into the depths of flower-bells, peered into all the nooks and chambers of the soul with inexhaustible enterprise. It is hard to deny that even _The Ring and the Book_ itself suffers something from the unflagging zest with which the poet pursues all the windings of popular speculation, all the fretwork of Angelo de Hyacinthis's forensic and domestic futilities. The poem is a great poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are "closets to search and alcoves to importune,"--

"The day wears, And door succeeds door, We try the fresh fortune, Range the wide house from the wing to the centre."

For the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct analysis in _Sordello_, he chose to make his men and women the instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of his delight in the dramatic monologue. He approached all problematic character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed, if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into integument and core. Not that Browning always displays the core; on the contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask. "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." Browning is less concerned to "save" the subjects of his so-called "Special Pleadings" than to imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about them; not naked as God made them, but clothed in the easy undress of their own subtly plausible illusions about themselves. But the optimist in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram's--

"Just when we're safest comes a sunset touch."

Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the obstacles it overcame. He imagined yet more vividly than he saw, and the stone wall which forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open door. In later life he came with growing persistence to regard the phenomenal world as a barrier of illusion between man and truth. But instead of chilling his faith, the obstacle only generated that poet's philosophy of the "value of a lie" which perturbs the less experienced reader of _Fifine_. "Truth" was "forced to manifest itself through falsehood," won thence by the excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy moment, till "through the shows of sense, which ever proving false still promise to be true," the soul of man worked its way to its final union with the soul of God.[118]

[Footnote 118: _Fifine at the fair_, cxxiv.]

* * * * *

And here at length if not before we have a clear glimpse of the athlete who lurks behind the explorer. Browning's joy in imagining impediment and illusion was only another aspect of his joy in the spiritual energy which answers to the spur of difficulty and "works" through the shows of sense; and this other joy found expression in a poetry of soul yet more deeply tinged with the native hue of his mind. "From the first, Power was, I knew;" and souls were the very central haunt and focus of its play. Not that strong natures, as such, have much part in Browning's poetic-world; the strength that allured his imagination was not the strength that is rooted in nerve or brain, slowly enlarging with the build of the organism, but the strength that has suddenly to be begotten or infused, that leaps by the magic of spiritual influence from heart to heart. If Browning multiplies and deepens the demarcations among material things, he gives his souls a rare faculty of transcending them. Bright spiritual beings like Pippa shed their souls innocently and unwittingly about like a spilth of "X-rays," and the irradiation penetrates instantly the dense opposing integuments of passion, cupidity, and worldliness. At all times in his life these accesses of spiritual power occupied his imagination. Cristina's momentary glance and the Lady of Tripoli's dreamed-of face lift their devotees to completeness:--

"She has lost me, I have gained her, Her soul's mine, and now grown perfect I shall pass my life's remainder."

Forty years later, Browning told with far greater realistic power and a grim humour suited to the theme, the "transmutation" of Ned Bratts. Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of Abib:--

"The very God! Think, Abib, dost thou think,-- So the All-great were the All-loving too"--

and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more splendid vision breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying Paracelsus, and he has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his darkened chamber crying that--

"Spite of thick air and closed doors God told him it was June,--when harebells grow, And all that kings could ever give or take Would not be precious as those blooms to me."

But it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A whole class of his characters--the most familiarly "Browningesque" division of them all--was shaped under the sway of this master-passion; the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail, baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of _Old Painters in Florence_, and _The Last Ride Together_, and _The Lost Mistress_; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the _Statue and the Bust_, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter. But his very preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No kind of vivid consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little, compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving, rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into "an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush, strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these songsters,--the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing; the intolerable pathos of _Ye Banks and Braes_, or of

"We twa hae paidl't in the burn Frae morning sun till dine,"

belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as in _The Confessional_, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated spirit, as in _Any Wife to any Husband_, or _A Woman's Last Word_; or into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in _The Worst of It_ or _James Lee's Wife_. And happiness, equally,--even the lover's happiness,--needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang, when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (_By the Fireside_)--

"Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away! How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, And life be a proof of this!"

Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul itself. The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue, angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's beasts:--

"Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye By moonlight;"

or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in _The Glove_ or the bright æthereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's head, with its

"membraned wings So wonderful, so wide, So sun-suffused;"[120]

or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. "I always love those wild creatures God sets up for themselves," he wrote to Miss Barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." [121]

[Footnote 119: _Donald_.]

[Footnote 120: Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke's excellent chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature.]

[Footnote 121: _To E.B.B._, 5th Jan. 1846.]

Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent. To bear the mark of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning's imagination hardly found in any other poet in the same degree. The "artificial products" of civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect" added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it added for Wordsworth. His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses, ships, shops. Most of these appealed also to other instincts,--to his joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent emotion. But their "artificiality" was an added attraction. The wedge, for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his muscle. The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing at the festal board. His delight in complex technicalities, in the tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in mere intricacy as such. His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous achievements of art. If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible mace; the morning sun pours into Pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl; and Fifine's ear is

"cut Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[122]

[Footnote 122: _Fifine at the Fair_, ii. 325.]

Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called

"a rude Armour ... hammered out, in time to be Approved beyond the Roman panoply Melted to make it."[123]

[Footnote 123: _Sordello_, i. 135.]

And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded _Wahrheit_ and _Dichtung_ of his greatest poem.

Between _Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_ there was, indeed, in Browning's mind, a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides.