Chapter 4

in verse, and in rhyme; and Browning's bent and faculty for both was very early pronounced. "I never can recollect not writing rhymes; ... but I knew they were nonsense even then." And a well-known anecdote of his infancy describes his exhibition of a lively sense of metre in verses which he recited with emphatic accompaniments upon the edge of the dining-room table before he was tall enough to look over it. The crowding thoughts of his maturity had not yet supervened to prevent the abundant music that he "had in him" from "getting out." It is not surprising that a boy of these proclivities was captivated by the stormy swing and sweep of Byron; nor that he should have caught also something of his "splendour of language," and even, a little later, a reflection, respectable and suburban enough, of his rebellious Titanism. The less so, that in Robert's eleventh or twelfth year Byron, the head of the Satanic school, had become the heroic champion of Greek liberation, and was probably spoken of with honour in the home of the large-hearted banker who had in his day suffered so much for the sake of the unemancipated slave. In later years Browning was accustomed to deliver himself of breezy sarcasms at the expense of the "flat-fish" who declaimed so eloquently about the "deep and dark blue ocean." But it is easy to see that this genial chaff covered a real admiration,--the tribute of one abounding nature to another, which even years and the philosophic mind did not seriously abate. "I always retained my first feeling for Byron in many respects," he wrote in a significant letter to Miss Barrett in 1846. " ... I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure,--while Heaven knows that I 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."[4] It was thus no mere freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems. He entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, _Incondita_, and his parents sought to publish them. No publisher could be found; but they won the attention of a notable critic, W.J. Fox, who feared too much splendour and too little thought in the young poet, but kept his eye on him nevertheless.

[Footnote 4: _To E.B.B._, Aug. 22, 1846.]

Two years later the boy of fourteen caught the accents of another poetic voice, destined to touch the sources of music and passion in him with far more intimate power. His casual discovery, on a bookstall, of "Mr Shelley's Atheistical poem" seems to have for the first time made known to him even the name of the poet who had died in Italy four years before. Something of Shelley's story seems to have been known to his parents. It gives us a measure of the indulgent sympathy and religious tolerance which prevailed in this Evangelical home, that the parents should have unhesitatingly supplied the boy of fourteen, at some cost of time and trouble, with all the accessible writings of the "atheistical" poet, and with those of his presumably like-minded friend Keats as well. He fell instantly under the spell of both. Whatever he may have known before of ancient or modern literature, the full splendour of romantic poetry here broke upon him for the first time. Immature as he was, he already responded instinctively to the call of the spirits most intimately akin to his own. Byron's stormy power thrilled and delighted him; but it was too poor in spiritual elements, too negative, self-centred, and destructive to stir the deeper sources of Browning's poetry. In Keats and in Shelley he found poetic energies not less glowing and intense, bent upon making palpable to eye and ear visions of beauty which, with less of superficial realism, were fed by far more exquisite and penetrating senses, and attached by more and subtler filaments to the truth of things. Beyond question this was the decisive literary experience of Browning's early years. Probably it had a chief part in making the poet's career his fixed ideal, and ultimately, with his father's willing consent, his definite choice. What we know of his inner and outer life during the important years which turned the boy into the man is slight and baffling enough. The fiery spirit of poetry can rarely have worked out its way with so little disturbance to the frame. Minute scrutiny has disclosed traits of unrest and revolt; he professed "atheism" and practised vegetarianism, betrayed at times the aggressive arrogance of an able youth, and gave his devoted and tender parents moments of very superfluous concern. For with all his immensely vivacious play of brain, there was something in his mental and moral nature from first to last stubbornly inelastic and unimpressible, that made him equally secure against expansion and collapse. The same simple tenacity of nature which kept his buoyantly adventurous intellect permanently within the tether of a few primary convictions, kept him, in the region of practice and morality, within the bounds of a rather nice and fastidious decorum. Malign influences effected no lodgment in a nature so fundamentally sound; they might cloud and trouble imagination for a while, but their scope hardly extended further, and as they were literary in origin, so they were mainly literary in expression. In the meantime he was laying, in an unsystematic but not ineffective way, the foundations of his many-sided culture and accomplishment. We hear much of private tutors, of instruction in French, in music, in riding, fencing, boxing, dancing; of casual attendance also at the Greek classes in University College. In all these matters he seems to have won more or less definite accomplishment, and from most of them his versatile literary talent took, at one time or another, an effective toll. The athletic musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in a gallop, was to make verse simulate, as hardly any artificer had made it before, the labyrinthine meanderings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing of hoofs.

Of all these varied aims and aspirations, of all in short that was going on under the surface of this brilliant and versatile Robert Browning of twenty, we have a chaotic reflection in the famous fragment _Pauline_. The quite peculiar animosity with which its author in later life regarded this single "crab" of his youthful tree of knowledge only adds to its interest. He probably resented the frank expression of passion, nowhere else approached in his works. Yet passion only agitates the surface of _Pauline_. Whether Pauline herself stand for an actual woman--Miss Flower or another--or for the nascent spell of womanhood--she plays, for one who is ostensibly the heroine of the poem, a discouragingly minor part. No wonder she felt tempted to advise the burning of so unflattering a record. Instead of the lyric language of love, she has to receive the confessions of a subtle psychologist, who must unlock the tumultuous story of his soul "before he can sing." And these confessions are of a kind rare even amongst self-revelations of genius. Pauline's lover is a dreamer, but a dreamer of an uncommon species. He is preoccupied with the processes of his mind, but his mind ranges wildly over the universe and chafes at the limitations it is forced to recognise. Mill, a master, not to say a pedant, of introspection, recognised with amazement the "intense self-consciousness" of this poet, and self-consciousness is the keynote which persists through all its changing harmonies. It is the self-consciousness of a soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid intelligence to recognise a host of outer realities not itself, which it constantly strives to bring into relation with itself, as constantly baffled and thrown back by the obstinate objectivity of that outer world. A pure dreamer would have "contentedly lived in a nut-shell and imagined himself king of infinite space"; a purely scientific intelligence would have applied himself to the patient mastery of facts; in the hero of _Pauline_ the despotic senses and intellect of science and the imperious imagination of the poet appear to coexist and to contend, and he tosses to and fro in a fever of fitful efforts, continually frustrated, to find complete spiritual response and expressiveness in the intractable maze of being. There had indeed been an earlier time when the visions of old poets had wholly sufficed him; and the verses in which he recalls them have almost the pellucid charm of Homer,--

"Never morn broke clear as those On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea, The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves."

But growing intellect demanded something more. Shelley, the "Sun-treader," weaving soul and sense into a radiant vesture "from his poet's station between both," did much to sustain him; Plato's more explicit and systematic idealism gave him for a while a stronger assurance. But disillusion broke in: "Suddenly, without heart-wreck I awoke; I said, 'twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!" Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh. He steeps himself in the concrete vitality of things, lives in imagination through "all life where it is most alive," immerses himself in all that is most beautiful and intense in Nature, so fulfilling, it might seem, his passionate craving to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all,"--yet only to feel that satisfaction is not here:

"My soul saddens when it looks beyond: I cannot be immortal, taste all joy;"

only the sickness of satiety. But when all joy was tasted, what then? If there was any "crowning" state, it could only be, thought Browning, one in which the soul looked up to the unattainable infinity of God.

Such seem to be the outlines of the mental history which passes before us, brilliant and incoherent as a dream, in _Pauline_. The material, vast and many-sided as it is, is not fully mastered; but there is nothing merely imitative; it is everywhere Browning, and no mere disciple of Shelley or another, who is palpably at work. The influence of Shelley seems, indeed, to have been already outgrown when _Pauline_ was written; Browning gloried in him and in his increasing fame, but he felt that his own aims and destiny were different. Rossetti, a few years later, took _Pauline_ to be the work of an unconscious pre-Raphaelite; and there is enough of subtle simplicity, of curious minuteness, in the details to justify the error. In the meantime many outward circumstances conspired to promote the "advance" which every line of it foretold. His old mentor of the _Incondita_ days, W.J. Fox, in some sort a Browningite before Browning, reviewed _Pauline_ in _The Monthly Repository_ (April 1833) with generous but discerning praise. This was the beginning of a warm friendship between the two, which ended only with Fox's death. It was founded upon hearty admiration on both sides, and no man living was better qualified to scatter the morbid films that clung about the expanding genius of young Browning than this robust and masculine critic and preacher. A few months later came an event of which we know very little, but which at least did much to detach him from the limited horizons of Camberwell. At the invitation of M. Benckhausen, Russian consul-general, Browning accompanied him, in the winter of 1833-34, on a special mission to St Petersburg. The journey left few apparent traces on his work. But he remembered the rush of the sledge through the forest when, half a century later, he told the thrilling tale of _Iván Ivánovitch_. And even the modest intimacy with affairs of State obtainable in the office of a consul-general seems to have led his thoughts seriously to diplomacy as a career. One understands that to the future dissector of a Hohenstiel-Schwangau and a Blougram the career might present attractions. It marks the seriousness of his ambition that he actually applied for a post in the Persian Embassy. This fancy of _Ferishtah_, like a similar one of ten years later, was not gratified, but the bent which was thus thwarted in practical life disported itself freely in poetry, and the marks of the diplomatist _in posse_ are pretty clearly legible in the subtle political webs which make up so much of the plots of _Strafford, King Victor_, and _Sordello_.

But much sharper rebuffs than this would have failed to disturb the immense buoyancy of Browning's temperament. He was twenty-three, and in the first flush of conscious power. His exuberant animal spirits flowed out in whimsical talk; he wrote letters of the gayest undergraduate _insouciance_ to Fox, and articles full of extravagant jesting for _The Trifler_, an amateur journal which received the lucubrations of his little circle. He enjoyed life like a boy, and shared its diversions like a man about town. These superficial vivacities were the slighter play of a self-consciousness which in its deeper recesses was steadily gathering power, richness, and assurance. His keen social instincts saved him from most of the infirmities of budding genius; but the poems he contributed to Fox's journal during the following two years (1834-36) show a significant predilection for imagining the extravagances and fanaticisms of lonely self-centred minds. Joannes Agricola, sublime on the dizzy pinnacle of his theological arrogance, looking up through the gorgeous roof of heaven and assured that nothing can stay his course to his destined abode, God's breast; Porphyria's lover, the more uncanny fanatic who murders with a smile; the young man who in his pride of power sees in the failures and mistakes of other men examples providentially intended for his guidance,--it was such subjects as these that touched Browning's fancy in those ardent and sanguine years. He probably entered with keener relish into these extravagances than his maturer wisdom approved. It is significant, at any rate, that when _Agricola_ and _Porphyria's Lover_ were republished in _The Bells and Pomegranates_ of 1842, a new title, _Madhouse Cells_, gave warning that their insanity was not to be attributed to the poet. The verses "Still ailing wind," he qualified in a yet more explicit fashion twenty years later, for they are the young man's poem which James Lee's wife reads "under the cliff," and subjects to her austere and disillusioned criticism. But they mark the drift of Browning of the mid-'Thirties, so far as they go, clearly enough. Fortunately, however, we are not dependent upon these slight clues. For during the winter months of 1834-35 he was occupied in portraying a far more imposing embodiment of the young man's pride of power, a Joannes Agricola of equally superb confidence and far more magnificent ideals. In April 1835 Browning was able to announce to his good friend Fox the completion of _Paracelsus_.

He owed the suggestion to another new acquaintance, whose intimacy, like that of the Russian consul-general, marks the fascination exercised by young Browning upon men of antecedents, race, and social standing widely different from his own. Count Amédée de Ripert Monclar was a French royalist and refugee; he was also an enthusiastic student of history. Possibly he recognised an affinity between the vaguely outlined dreams of Pauline's lover and those of the historic Paracelsus; and he may well have thought that the task of grappling with definite historic material would steady the young poet's hand. We could applaud the acuteness of the suggestion with more confidence had not the Count had an unlucky afterthought, which he regarded as fatal, to the effect that the story of Paracelsus, however otherwise adapted to the creator of Pauline's lover, was entirely destitute of a Pauline. There was no opening for love. But Pauline, with all her warm erotic charms and her sparkling French prose, was the most unsubstantial and perishable thing in the poem which bore her name: she and the spirit which begot her had vanished like a noisome smoke, and Browning threw himself with undiminished ardour upon the task of interpreting a career in which the sole sources of romance and of tragedy appeared to be the passion for knowledge and the arrogance of discovery.

For it is quite clear that, whatever criticisms Browning finally brought to bear upon Paracelsus, his attitude towards him, at no time hostile, was at the outset rather that of a literary champion, vindicating a man of original genius from the calumnies of ignorance and dulness. This view, then rather unusual, was a very natural one for him to take, Paracelsus being among the many keen interests of the elder Browning.[5] It is a strange mistake to suppose, with a recent very ingenious commentator, that Browning, eager to destroy the fallacy of intellectual pride, singled out Paracelsus as a crucial example of the futilities of intellect. On the contrary, he filled his annotations with documentary evidences which attest not only the commanding scientific genius of Paracelsus, but the real significance of his achievements, even for the modern world. In the intellectual hunger of Paracelsus, in that "insatiable avidity of penetrating the secrets of nature" which his follower Bitiskius (approvingly quoted by Browning) ascribed to him, he saw a fascinating realisation of his own vague and chaotic "restlessness." Here was a spirit made up in truth "of an intensest life," driven hither and thither by the hunger for intellectual mastery of the universe; and Browning, far from convicting him of intellectual futility, has made him actually 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 own.

[Footnote 5: His library, as I am informed by Prof. Hall Griffin, contained a copy of the works of Paracelsus, doubtless that used by his son.]

While he thus lavished his utmost power on portraying the soaring genius of Paracelsus, as he conceived it, he turned impatiently away from the husk of popular legend by which it was half obscured. He shrank from no attested fact, however damaging; but he brushed away the accretions of folklore, however picturesque. The attendant spirit who enabled Paracelsus to work his marvellous cures, and his no less renowned Sword, were for Browning contemptible futilities. Yet a different way of treating legend lay nearer to the spirit of contemporary poetry. Goethe had not long before evolved his Mephistopheles from the "attendant spirit" attached by that same sixteenth century to the Paracelsus of Protestantism, Faust; Tennyson was already meditating a scene full of the enchantment of the Arthurian sword Excalibur. Browning's peremptory rejection of such springs of poetry marks one of his limitations as a poet. Much of the finest poetry of _Faust_, as, in a lower degree, of the _Idylls_, is won by a subtle transformation of the rude stuff of popular imagination: for Browning, with rare exceptions, this rude stuff was dead matter, impervious to his poetic insight, and irresponsive to the magic of his touch. Winnowing the full ears, catching eagerly the solid and stimulating grain, he hardly heeded the golden gleam of the chaff as it flew by.

He did not, however, refrain from accentuating his view of the story by interweaving in it some gracious figures of his own. Festus, the honest, devoted, but somewhat purblind friend, who offers Paracelsus the criticism of sober common-sense, and is vindicated--at the bar of common-sense--by his great comrade's tragic end; Michal, an exquisitely tender outline of womanhood, even more devoted, and even less distinguished; and the "Italian poet" Aprile, a creature of genius, whose single overpowering thought avails to break down the stronghold of Paracelsus's else unassailable conviction. Aprile, who lives for love as Paracelsus for knowledge, is not to be identified with Shelley, but he has unmistakable Shelleyan traits, and the dreamy pageant of his imaginary creations might stand for a summary review of Shelley's work. Had Shelley lived, he might have come nearer than any one else to fulfilling the rounded and complete ideal of which Paracelsus and Aprile were dissevered halves: the greater part of his actual achievement belonged, Browning evidently thought, to the category of those dazzling but imperfectly objective visions which he ascribes to his Aprile. But Shelley--the poet of _Alastor_, the passionate "lover of Love," was yet the fittest embodiment of that other finer spiritual energy which Paracelsus in his Faustian passion for knowledge had ruthlessly put from him. Sixteen years later, Browning was to define in memorable words what he held to be the "noblest and predominating characteristic of Shelley"--viz., "his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the Absolute and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge." This divining and glorifying power it is that Browning ascribes to Love; the lack of it is in his conception the tragic flaw which brings to the ground the superbly gifted genius of Paracelsus. This genuine and original tragic motive is not worked out with uniform power; his degeneration, his failures, are painted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted with either. But all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great moments in Paracelsus's career,--the scene in the quiet Würzburg garden, where he conquers the doubts of Festus and Michal by the magnificent assurance of his faith in his divine calling; and that in the hospital cell at Salzburg, where his fading mind anticipates at the point of death the clearness of immortal vision as he lays bare the conquered secret of the world.

That Paracelsian secret of the world was for Browning doubtless the truth, though he never again expounded it so boldly. Paracelsus's reply to the anxious inquiry of Festus whether he is sure of God's forgiveness: "I have lived! We have to live alone to well set forth God's praise"--might stand as a text before the works of Browning. In all life he sees the promise and the potency of God,--in the teeming vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies of man, in the rich conquests of his Art, in his myth-woven Nature. "God is glorified in Man, and to man's glory vowed I soul and limb." The historic Paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to connect vast conceptions of Nature akin to this with the detail of his empiric discoveries. Browning, with his mind, as always, set upon things psychical, attributes to him a parallel incapacity to connect his far-reaching vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or blockish specimens of the genus Man whom he encountered in the detail of practice. It was the problem which Browning himself was to face, and in his own view triumphantly to solve; and Paracelsus, rising into the clearness of his dying vision, becomes the mouthpiece of Browning's own criticism of his failure, the impassioned advocate of the Love which with him is less an elemental energy drawing things into harmonious fusion than a subtle weapon of the intellect, making it wise

"To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, To know even hate is but a mask of love's, To see a good in evil and a hope In ill-success."

Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle, restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of genius,--a beauty like that of Amiens or Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not yet begun to perplex or to disintegrate.