Chapter 6

MATURING METHODS. DRAMAS AND DRAMATIC LYRICS.

Since Chaucer was alive and hale, No man hath walk'd along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse. --LANDOR.

The memorable moment when Browning, standing on the ruined palace-step at Venice, had taken Humanity for his mate, opened an epoch in his poetic life to which the later books of _Sordello_ form a splendid prelude. For the Browning of 1840 it was no longer a sufficient task to trace the epochs in the spiritual history of lonely idealists, to pursue the problem of existence in minds themselves preoccupied with its solution. "Soul" is still his fundamental preoccupation; but the continued play of an eager intellect and vivacious senses upon life has immensely multiplied the points of concrete experience which it vivifies and transfigures to his eyes. It is as if a painter trained in the school of Raphael or Lionardo had discovered that he could use the minute and fearless brush of the Flemings in the service of their ideals. He pursues soul in all its rich multiplicity, in the tortuosities and dark abysses of character; he forces crowds of sordid, grotesque, or commonplace facts to become its expressive speech; he watches its thought and passion projected into the tide of affairs, caught up in the clash and tangle of plot. In all these three ways the Dramas and Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, which were to be his poetic occupation during the Forties, detach themselves sharply from _Paracelsus_ and the early books of _Sordello_. A poem like _The Laboratory_ (1844), for instance, stands at almost the opposite pole of art to these. All that Browning neglected or veiled in _Paracelsus_ he here thrusts into stern relief. The passion and crime there faintly discerned in the background of ideally beautiful figures are here his absorbing theme. The curious technicalities of the chemist's workshop, taken for granted in _Paracelsus_, are now painted with a realism reminiscent of Romeo's Apothecary and _The Alchemist_. And the outward drama of intrigue, completely effaced in _Paracelsus_ by the inward drama of soul, sounds delusive scorn and laughter in the background, the more sinister because it is not seen. These lyrics and romances are "dramatic" not only in the sense that the speakers express, as Browning insisted, other minds and sentiments than his own, but in the more legitimate sense that they are plucked as it were out of the living organism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can be read in their self-revelation.

A poet whose lyrics were of this type might be expected to find in drama proper his free, full, and natural expression. This was not altogether the case with Browning, who, despite an unquenchable appetency for drama, did better work in his dramatic monologues than in his plays. The drama alone allowed full scope for the development of plot-interest. But it was less favourable to another yet more deeply rooted interest of his. Not only did action and outward event--the stuff of drama--interest Browning chiefly as "incidents in the development of soul," but they became congenial to his art only as projected upon some other mind, and tinged with its feeling and its thought. Half the value of a story for him lay in the colours it derived from the narrator's personality; and he told his own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most easily and effectively through alien lips. For a like reason he loved to survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a given moment, under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it imposed. Both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which directly "imitates action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue, which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. And Browning's dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments tense with memory and hope. The insuppressible alertness and enterprise of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments. He sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive with moving shapes. To the stricken girl in _Ye Banks and Braes_ memory is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points, the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love; whereas the victim of _The Confessional_ pours forth from her frenzied lips every detail of her tragic story.

So in _The Laboratory_, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of fierce impassioned consciousness:--

"He is with her, and they know that I know Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."

Both kinds--drama and dramatic lyric--continued to attract him, while neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently throughout the decade.

In this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning's monologues have no nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the great drama of history. To Landor, according to his wife's testimony, Browning "always said that he owed more than to any contemporary"; to Landor he dedicated the last volume of the _Bells and Pomegranates_. Landor, on his part, hailed in Browning the "inquiring eye" and varied discourse of a second Chaucer. It is hardly rash to connect with his admiration for the elder artist Browning's predilection for these brief revealing glimpses into the past. Browning cared less for the actual _personnel_ of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more spontaneous and naïve, anti-feudal temper. The French camp and the Spanish cloister, _Gismond_ and _My Last Duchess_ (originally called _France_ and _Italy_), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages, and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant imagination and pronounced antipathies.

But in one point Landor and Browning stood at opposite poles. Landor, far beyond any contemporary English example, had the classic sense and mastery of style; Browning's individuality of manner rested on a robust indifference to all the traditional conventions of poetic speech. The wave of realism which swept over English letters in the early 'Forties broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was rendered in sordid, grotesque, and homely terms. _Pickwick_ in 1837 had established the immense vogue of Dickens, the _Heroes_ in 1840 had assured the imposing prestige of Carlyle; and the example of both made for the freest and boldest use of language. Across the Channel the stupendous fabric of the _Comédie Humaine_ was approaching completion, and Browning was one of Balzac's keenest English readers. Alone among the greater poets of the time Browning was in genius and temperament a true kinsman to these great romantic realists; his poetry, as it emerged in the rich dramatic harvest of the 'Forties, is the nearest counterpart and analogue of their prose.

I.

Browning's first drama, as is well known, was the result of a direct application from Macready. Introduced in November 1835 by his "literary father" Fox, Browning immediately interested the actor. A reading of _Paracelsus_ convinced him that Browning could write, if not a good play, yet one with an effective tragic _rôle_ for himself. Strained relations with his company presently made him eager to procure this service. Browning, suddenly appealed to (in May 1836), promptly suggested _Strafford_. He was full of the subject, having recently assisted his friend Forster in compiling his life. The actor closed with the suggestion, and a year later (May 1, 1837) the play was performed at Covent Garden. The fine acting of Macready, and of Helen Faucit, who was now associated with him, procured the piece a moderate success. It went through five performances.

Browning's _Strafford_, like his _Paracelsus_, was a serious attempt to interpret a historic character; and historic experts like Gardiner have, as regards the central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. The other persons, and the action itself, he treated more freely, with evident regard to their value as secondary elements in the portrayal of Stafford; and it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innovations the well-marked ply of his mind. The harsh and rugged fanaticisms, the splendid frivolities, of the seventeenth century, fade and lose substance in an atmosphere charged with idealism and self-consciousness. Generous self-devotion is not the universal note, but it is the prevailing key, that in which the writer most naturally thinks and most readily invents. Strafford's devotion to Charles and Pym's to his country were historical; but Browning accentuates Pym's heroism by making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy Carlisle. "Give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, self-forgetting," he wrote a few years later to Miss Flower: the idea seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention of character. Something of the visionary exaltation of the dying Paracelsus thus hangs over the final scene in which Strafford goes to meet the fate which the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot turn aside. All the characters have something of the "deep self-consciousness" of the author of _Pauline_. Not that they are, any of them, drawn with very profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided apprehension of life. They are either absolutely simple, like Lady Carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or conflict of simple elements, like Strafford and Charles; but there is so much restless vivacity in their discourse, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly agitated by the play and cross-play of thought and feeling, that they seem more complex than they are.

Though played for only five nights, _Strafford_ had won a success which might well have dazzled a young and untried aspirant, and which was sufficiently impressive to shrewd men of business like Messrs Longman to induce them to undertake its publication free of cost. It appeared in April, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a significant sentence has already been quoted. The composition of _Strafford_ had not only "freshened a jaded mind" but permanently quickened his zest for the drama of political crises. New projects for historical dramas chased and jostled one another through his busy brain, which seems to have always worked most prosperously in a highly charged atmosphere. I am going "to begin ... thinking a Tragedy," he wrote characteristically to Miss Haworth--"(an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticisms on _Strafford_), and I want to have _another_ tragedy in prospect; I write best so provided."[16]

[Footnote 16: Orr, _Life_, p. 103.]

The "Historical Tragedies" here foreshadowed, _King Victor and King Charles_ and _The Return of the Druses_, were eventually published as the Second and Fourth of the _Bells and Pomegranates_, in 1842-43. How little Browning cared for history except as a quarry for psychical problems, how little concern he had at bottom with the changing drama of national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his good. In _Strafford_ as in _Paracelsus_, and even in _Sordello_, the subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous men. Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether. He seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,--Sardinia, Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth. _King Victor and King Charles_ contains far less poetry than _Paracelsus_, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe. There was material for genuine tragedy in the story. The old king, who after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,--this King Victor has something in him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an Albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which Browning brings to bear upon him. Reluctantly he orders Victor's arrest, and when the old man, baffled and exasperated, is brought before him and imperiously demands the crown, he puts it upon his father's head. Neither character is drawn with the power of Strafford, but the play is largely built upon the same contrasts between personal devotion and political expediency, the untutored idealism of youth and the ruses or rigidity of age. This was a type of dramatic action which Browning imagined with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a contrast between contending elements of his own nature. Towards this type all his drama tended to gravitate. In _The Return of the Druses_ Browning's native bent can be more freely studied, for history has contributed only the general situation. His turn for curious and far-fetched incident is nowhere better illustrated than in this tangled intrigue carried on between Frankish Hospitallers, Venetians, and Druses of Lebanon in a lonely island of the Aegean where none of the three are at home. A political revolution--the revolt of the Druses against their Frankish lords--provides the outer momentum of the action; but the central interest is concentrated upon a "Soul's tragedy," in which the conflict of races goes on within the perplexed and paralysed bosom of a single man. Djabal, the Druse patriot brought up in Brittany, analyses his own character with the merciless self-consciousness of Browning himself:

"I with my Arab instinct--thwarted ever By my Frank policy, and with in turn My Frank brain thwarted by my Arab heart-- While these remained in equipoise, I lived-- Nothing; had either been predominant, As a Frank schemer or an Arab mystic I had been something."

The conflict between policy and devotion is now transferred to the arena of a single breast, where its nature is somewhat too clearly understood and formulated. The "Frank schemer" conceives the plan of turning the Druse superstition to account by posing as an incarnation of their Founder. But the "Arab mystic" is too near sharing the belief to act his part with ease, and while he is still paltering the devoted Anael slays the Prefect. The play is thenceforth occupied, ostensibly, with the efforts of the Christian authorities to discover and punish the murderers. Its real subject is the subtle changes wrought in Djabal and Anael by their gradual transition from the relation of prophet and devotee to that of lovers. Her passion, even before he comes to share it, has begun to sap the security of his false pretensions: he longs, not at first to disavow them, but to make them true: he will be the prophetic helper of his people in very deed. To the outer world he maintains his claim with undiminished boldness and complete success; but the inner supports are gradually giving way, Arab mystic and Frank schemer lose their hold, and

"A third and better nature rises up, My mere man's nature."

Anael, a simpler character than any previous woman of the plays, thus has a more significant function. Lady Carlisle fumbles blindly with the dramatic issues without essentially affecting them; Polyxena furthers them with loyal counsel, but is not their main executant. Anael, in her fervid devotion, not only precipitates the catastrophe, but emancipates her lover from the thraldom of his lower nature. In her Browning for the first time in drama represented the purifying power of Love. The transformations of soul by soul were already beginning to occupy Browning's imagination. The poet of _Cristina_ and _Saul_ was already foreshadowed. But nothing as yet foreshadowed the kind of spiritual influence there portrayed--that which, instead of making its way through the impact of character upon character, passion upon passion, is communicated through an unconscious glance or a song. For one who believed as fixedly as Browning in the power of these moments to change the prevailing bias of character and conduct, such a conception was full of implicit drama. A chance inspiration led him to attempt to show how a lyric soul flinging its soul-seed unconsciously forth in song might become the involuntary _deus ex machina_ in the tangle of passion and plot through which she moved, resolving its problems and averting its catastrophes.

The result was a poem which Elizabeth Barrett "could find it in her heart to envy" its author, which Browning himself (in 1845) liked better than anything else he had yet done.[17] It has won a not less secure place in the affections of all who care for Browning at all. It was while walking alone in a wood near Dulwich, we are told by Mrs Orr, that "the idea flashed upon him of some one walking thus through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo."[18] The most important effect of this design was to call out Browning's considerable powers of rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised elements of the human drama upon which Pippa was to flash her transforming spell. His somewhat burly jocosity had expatiated freely in letters; but he had done nothing which, like the cynical chaff of his art students, suggests the not unskilful follower of Balzac and Dickens. And he had given no hint of the elemental tragic power shown in the great Ottima and Sebald scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality, the magnificence in sin, of Ottima herself.

[Footnote 17: _Letters of R. and E.B.B._, i. 28.]

[Footnote 18: Orr, _Handbook_, p. 55.]

_Pippa Passes_, the most romantic in conception of all Browning's plays, thus first disclosed his genius for realism. _Strafford_, _King Victor_, _The Druses_ are couched in the tempered ideality of blank verse; here we pass to and fro from the airiest lyric to the most massive and sinewy prose. It counted for something, too, that Italy, and above all the little hill-town in which the scene was laid, was a vivid personal memory, not a vague region of fancy like his Sardinia or Lebanon. Asolo, with its walls and turret, its bishop's palace and duomo, and girls sitting on the steps, its upland farms among the cherry orchards, its beetles sparkling along the dust, its "warm slow yellow moonlit nights" of May, and "glaring pomps" of June,--Asolo, with its legend of "Kate the queen" and her carolling page, lives as few other spots do for Browning's readers. Pippa herself, in her exquisite detachment from the sordid humanity amid which she moves, might have appeared too like a visionary presence, not of earth though on it, had she not been brought into touch, at so many points, with things that Browning had seen. _Pippa Passes_ has, among Browning's dramas, the same kind of peculiar interest which belongs to the _Tempest_ and to _Faust_ among Shakespeare's and Goethe's. Faery and devilry were not Browning's affair; but, within the limits of his resolute humanism, _Pippa Passes_ is an ideal construction, shadowing forth, under the semblance of a single definite bit of life, the controlling elements, as Browning imagined them, in all life. For Browning, too, the world teemed with Stephanos and Trinculos, Sebastians and Antonios; it was, none the less, a magical Isle, where strange catastrophes and unsuspected revolutions sprang suddenly into being at the unseen carol of Ariel as he passed. Browning's Ariel is the organ of a spiritual power which, unlike Prospero, seeks not merely to detect and avert crime, or merely to dismiss the would-be criminal, forgiven, to "live and deal with others better," but to renovate character; to release men from the bondage of their egoisms by those influences, slight as a flower-bell or a sunset touch, which renew us by setting all our aims and desires in a new proportion.

II.

Browning's first four plays seemed to mark a growing neglect of the requirements and traditions of the stage. He might even appear to have renounced the stage altogether when in 1841 he arranged with Moxon to publish his writings in a cheap pamphlet form. The first number of _Bells and Pomegranates_ contained the least theatrical of his dramas, _Pippa Passes_. "Two or three years ago" he declared in the preface (not reprinted), "I wrote a play, about which the chief matter I much care to recollect at present is that a Pit-full of good-natured people applauded it. Ever since I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals; and I amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again."

But Browning's ambition for fame as a maker of plays was still keen, and nothing but a renewed invitation to write for the stage was needed to lure him back into tentative compliance with its ways. In the course of 1841 Macready intervened with a request for another play from the author of _Strafford_.[19] Thereupon Browning produced with great rapidity _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_. After prolonged and somewhat sordid green-room vicissitudes, it was performed on Feb. 11, 1843. Macready, its first begetter, did his best to wreck it; the majority of the players refused to understand their parts; but through the fine acting of Helen Faucit (Mildred) and Phelps (Lord Tresham), it achieved a moderate but brief success.

[Footnote 19: The date is fixed by Browning's statement (Orr, p. 119).]

The choice of subject indicates, as has been said, a desire to make terms with stage tradition. But the ordinary theatre-goer, who went expecting to witness what the title appeared to promise, found himself, as the play proceeded, perplexed and out of his bearings. An English nobleman, with the deep-engrained family pride of his order, had suffered, or was to suffer, dishonour. But this seemingly commonplace _motif_ was developed in a strange and unfamiliar ethical atmosphere--an atmosphere of moral ideas which seemed to embrace both those who upheld the feudal honour and those who "blotted" it; to hint at a purity deeper than sin. In a more sinister sense than _Colombe's Birthday_, this play might have been prefaced by the beautiful motto of its successor:--

"Ivy and violet, what do ye here With blossom and shoot in the warm spring weather Hiding the arms of Montecchi and Vere?"

The love of Mildred and Mertoun, which blots the Tresham 'scutcheon, is in origin as innocent as that which breaks into flower across the royal ambitions of Colombe; and their childlike purity of passion becomes, in spite of the wrong to which it has led them, the reconciling fact upon which at the close all animosities and resentments die away. The conception is genuinely tragic, for the doom which descends upon them all is a Nemesis which they have all contributed to provoke, but which none of them deserves; and which precisely the blended nobility and naïveté of Mildred and Mertoun prevents from passing by them altogether. More mature or less sensitive lovers would have found an issue from the situation as easily as an ordinary Hamlet from his task of vengeance. But Mertoun and Mildred are at once too timid and too audacious, too tremulous in their consciousness of guilt, too hardy and reckless in their mutual devotion, to carry through so difficult a game. Mertoun falters and stammers in his suit to Tresham; Mildred stands mute at her brother's charge, incapable of evasion, only resolute not to betray. Yet these same two children in the arts of politic self-defence are found recklessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in Mildred's chamber with the aid of all the approved resources and ruses of romance--the disguise, the convenient tree, the signal set in the window, the lover's serenade. And when the lover, who dared all risks to his lady and to himself for a stolen interview with her night by night, finally encounters Tresham, he is instantly paralysed, and will not even lift a sword in his own defence. Upon this union of boundless daring for one another's sake and sensibility to the shame of having wronged the house and blotted the 'scutcheon Mertoun's fate hangs, and with his Mildred's, and with hers Tresham's.

Beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of Mertoun and Mildred, Browning characteristically sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly affection of Gwendolen and Austin. One has a glimpse here of his habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all easy completeness on a low plane. It is Gwendolen herself who half disarms that criticism, or makes it, as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by instantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality of Mertoun's love. "Mark him, Austin: that's true love! Ours must begin again." In Tresham Browning seems to have designed to portray the finest type of ancestral pride. He is "proud" of his "interminable line," because the men were all "paladins" and the women all of flawless honour; and he has the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well as its honourable pride. When Mertoun has received his death-stroke and told his story, the tenderness comes out; the sullied image of his passionately loved sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up before him in mute intolerable reproach; and Mildred has scarcely breathed her last in his arms when Tresham succumbs to the poison he has taken in remorse for his hasty act. It is unlucky that this tragic climax, finely conceived as it is, is marred by the unconscious burlesque of his "Ah,--I had forgotten: I am dying." In such things one feels Browning's want of the unerring sureness of a great dramatist at the crucial moments of action.

Although not brilliantly successful on the boards, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ made a deep impression upon the more competent part of the audience. For Browning himself the most definite result was that Macready passed out of his life--for twenty years they never met--and that his most effective link with the stage was thus finally severed. But his more distant and casual relations with it were partly balanced by the much enlarged understanding of dramatic effect which he had by this time won; and _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ was followed by a drama which attains a beauty and charm not far below that of _Pippa Passes_ under the conditions of a regular dramatic plot. The ostensible subject of _Colombe's Birthday_ is a political crisis on the familiar lines;--an imperilled throne in the centre of interest, a background of vague oppression and revolt. But as compared with _King Victor_ or _The Druses_ the dispute is harmless, the tumult of revolution easily overheard. The diplomatic business is not etherealised into romance, like the ladies' embassy in _Love's Labour's Lost_; but neither is it allowed to become grave or menacing. Berthold's arrival to present his claim to the government of this miniature state affects us somewhat like the appearance of a new and formidable player in some drawing-room diversion; and the "treason" of the courtiers like the "unfairness" of children at play. Nevertheless, the victory of love over political interest which the motto foreshadows is not accomplished without those subtle fluctuations and surprises which habitually mark the conduct of Browning's plots. The alternative issues gain in seriousness and ideality as we proceed, and Browning has nowhere expressed the ideal of sovereignty more finely than it is expressed in this play, by the man for whose sake a sovereign is about to surrender her crown.[20] Colombe herself is one of Browning's most gracious and winning figures. She brings the ripe decision of womanhood to bear upon a series of difficult situations without losing the bright glamour of her youth. Her inborn truth and nature draw her on as by a quiet momentum, and gradually liberate her from the sway of the hollow fictions among which her lot is cast. Valence, the outward instrument of this liberation, is not the least noble of that line of chivalrous lovers which reaches from Gismond to Caponsacchi. With great delicacy the steps are marked in this inward and spiritual "flight" of Colombe. Valence's "way of love" is to make her realise the glory and privileges of the rulership which places her beyond his reach, at the very moment when she is about to resign it in despair. She discovers the needs of the woman and the possibilities of power at the same time, and thus is brought, by Valence's means, to a mood in which Prince Berthold's offer of his hand and crown together weighs formidably, for a moment, against Valence's offer of his love alone, until she discovers that Berthold is the very personation, in love and in statecraft alike, of the fictions from which she had escaped. Then, swiftly recovering herself, she sets foot finally on the firm ground where she had first sought her "true resource."

[Footnote 20: This fine speech of Valence to the greater glory of his rival (Act iv.) is almost too subtle for the stage. Browning with good reason directed its omission unless "a very good Valence" could be found.]

Berthold, like Blougram, Ogniben, and many another of Browning's mundane personages, is a subtler piece of psychology than men of the type of Valence, in whom his own idealism flows freely forth. He comes before us with a weary nonchalance admirably contrasted with the fiery intensity of Valence. He means to be emperor one day, and his whole life is a process of which that is to be the product; but he finds the process unaffectedly boring. Without relaxing a whit in the mechanical pursuit of his end, he views life with much mental detachment, and shows a cool and not unsympathetic observation of men who pursue other ideals, as well as an abundance of critical irony towards those who apparently share his own. An adept in courtly arts, and owing all his successes to courtly favour, he meets the assiduities of other courtiers with open contempt. His ends are those of Laertes or Fortinbras, and he is quite capable of the methods of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but he regards ends and methods alike with the sated distaste of Hamlet. By birth and principle a man of action, he has, even more than most of Browning's men of action, the curious introspectiveness of the philosophic onlooker. He "watches his mind," and if he does not escape illusions, recognises and exposes them with ironical candour. Few of Browning's less right-minded persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:--

"All is for the best. Too costly a flower were this, I see it now, To pluck and set upon my barren helm To wither,--any garish plume will do."

_Colombe's Birthday_ was published in 1844 as No. 6 of the _Bells_, but had for the present no prospect of the stage. Nine years later, however, the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at Sadler's Wells.

The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom and prose the fact. Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after finishing _Colombe's Birthday_.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. _A Soul's Tragedy_ exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial _savoir faire_ in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the _Wild Duck_. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of _Pippa Passes_. Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could look back upon with regret, almost with scorn. His intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it. "For _The Soul's_ _Tragedy_," he wrote (Feb. 11)--"that will surprise you, I think. There is no trace of you there,--you have not put out the black face of _it_--it is all sneering and disillusion--and shall not be printed but burned if you say the word." This word his correspondent, needless to add, did not say; on the contrary, she found it even more impressive than its successor _Luria_. This was, however, no tribute to its stage qualities; for in hardly one of his plays is the stage more openly ignored. The dramatic form, though still preserved, sets strongly towards monologue; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably the great portrait studies of _Men and Women_; it might be called _Ogniben_ with about as good right as they are called _Lippo Lippi_ or _Blougram_; the personality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes possession of the entire scene; we see the situation and the persons through the brilliant ironic mirror of his mind. The Chiappino of the second act is Ogniben's Chiappino, as Gigadibs is Blougram's Gigadibs. His "tragedy" is one in which there is no room for terror or pity, only for contempt. All real stress of circumstance is excluded. Both sides fight with blunted weapons; the revolt is like one of those Florentine risings which the Brownings later witnessed with amusement from the windows of Casa Guidi, which were liable to postponement because of rain. The prefect who is "assassinated" does not die, and the rebellious city is genially bantered into submission. The "soul" of Chiappino is, in fact, not the stuff of which tragedy is made. Even in his instant acceptance of Luitolfo's bloodstained cloak when the pursuers are, as he thinks, at the door, he seems to have been casually switched off the proper lines of his character into a piece of heroism which properly belongs to the man he would like to be thought, but has not the strength to be. On the whole, Browning's scorn must be considered to have injured his art. Tragedy, in the deepest sense, lay beyond his sphere; and this "tragedy" of mere degeneration and helpless collapse left untouched all the springs from which his poetry drew its life.

[Footnote 21: Browning's letter to Elizabeth Barrett, Feb. 13, 1846, which does not seem to have been adequately noticed. The piece is ignored by Mrs Orr. He speaks of suspending the publication of the "unlucky play" until a second edition of the _Bells_--an "apparition" which Moxon, he says, seems to think possible; and then inserting it before _Luria_: it will then be "in its place, for it was written two or three years ago." In other words, _The Soul's Tragedy_ was written in 1843-44, between _Colombe's Birthday_ and _Luria_.]

In the autumn of 1844 Browning made a second tour to Italy. It was chiefly memorable for his meeting, at Leghorn, with Edward John Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction;--one who had not only himself "seen Shelley plain," but has contributed more than any one else, save Hogg, to flash the unfading image of what he saw on the eyes of posterity. The journey quickened and enriched his Italian memories; and left many vivid traces in the poetry of the following year. Among these was the drama of _Luria_, ultimately published as the concluding number of the _Bells_.

In this remarkable drama Browning turned once more to the type of historical tragedy which he had originally essayed in _Strafford_. The fall of a man of passionate fidelity through the treachery of the prince or the people in whom he has put his trust, was for Browning one of the most arresting of the great traditional motives of tragic drama. He dwelt with emphasis upon this aspect of the fate of Charles's great minister; in _Luria_, where he was working uncontrolled by historical authority, it is the fundamental theme. At the same time the effect is heightened by those race contrasts which had been so abundantly used in _The Return of the Druses_. Luria is a Moor who has undertaken the service of Florence, and whose religion it is to serve her. Like Othello,[22] he has been intrusted, alien as he is, by a jealous and exacting State, with the supreme command of her military forces, a position in which the fervour of the Oriental and the frank simplicity of the soldier inevitably lie open to the subtle strategy of Italians and statesmen. "Luria," wrote Browning, while the whole scheme was "all in my brain yet, ... devotes himself to something he thinks Florence, and the old fortune follows, ... and I will soon loosen my Braccio and Puccio (a pale discontented man) and Tiburzio (the Pisan, good true fellow, this one), and Domizia the lady--loosen all these on dear foolish (ravishing must his folly be) golden-hearted Luria, all these with their worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways." Florence, in short, plays collectively somewhat the part of Iago to this second Othello, but of an Iago (need it be said) immeasurably less deeply rooted in malignity than Shakespeare's. It was a source of weakness as well as of strength in Browning as a dramatist that the evil things in men dissolve so readily under his scrutiny as if they were mere shells of flimsy disguise for the "soul of goodness" they contain. He has, in fact, put so much strong sense on the side of the jealous Florentine masters of his hero that his own sympathies were divided, with paralysing effect, it would seem, upon his interest in drama.[23] Even the formidable antagonism of Braccio, the Florentine Commissary, is buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to defend the rights of civilisation against militarism, of intellect against brute force. "Brute force shall not rule Florence." Even so, it is only after conflict and fluctuation that he decides to allow Luria's trial to take its course. Puccio, again, the former general of Florence, superseded by Luria, and now serving under his command, turns out not quite the "pale discontented man" whom Browning originally designed and whom such a situation was no doubt calculated to produce. Instead of a Cassius, enviously scowling at the greatness of his former comrade, Cæsar, we have one whose generous admiration for the alien set over him struggles hard, and not unsuccessfully, with natural resentment. In keeping with such company is the noble Pisan general, who vies with Luria in generosity and twice intervenes decisively to save him from the Florentine attack. Even Domizia, the "panther" lady who comes to the camp burning for vengeance upon Florence for the death of her kinsmen, and hoping to attain it by embroiling him with the city, finally emerges as his lover. But in Domizia he confessedly failed. The correspondence with Miss Barrett stole the vitality from all mere imaginary women; "the panther would not be tamed." Her hatred and her love alike merely beat the air. With all her volubility, she is almost as little in place in the economy of the drama as in that of the camp; her "wild mass of rage" has the air of being a valued property which she manages and exhibits, not an impelling and consuming fire. The more potent passion of Luria and his lieutenant Husain is more adequately rendered, though "the simple Moorish instinct" in them is made to accomplish startling feats in European subtlety. The East with its gift of "feeling" comes once more, as in the _Druses_, into tragic contact with the North and its gift of "thought"; but it is to the feeling East and not to thinking North that we owe the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast. Luria has indeed, like Djabal, assimilated just so much of European culture as makes its infusion fatal to him: he suffers the doom of the lesser race

"Which when it apes the greater is forgone."

But the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth at the close when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor in despair, but as a last act of passionate fidelity to Florence. This is conceived with a refinement of moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation on the stage; but of the tragic power and pathos of the conception there can be no question. Mrs Browning, whose eager interest accompanied this drama through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon its "grandeur." The busy exuberance of Browning's thinking was not favourable to effects which multiplicity of detail tends to destroy; but the fate of this son of the "lone and silent East," though utterly un-Shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than anything else in Browning's dramas, the heroic tragedy of Shakespeare.

[Footnote 22: Browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first reference to _Luria_ while still unwritten: _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B._, i. 26.]

[Footnote 23: "For me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with these as with him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild company any longer."--Feb. 26, 1845.]

III.

"Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light of a revolving lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow chink;" so wrote Browning in effect to Miss Barrett (Feb. 11, 1845) of the "scenes and song-scraps," of which the first instalment had appeared three years before as the _Dramatic Lyrics_. Yet it is just by the intermittent flashes that the lighthouse is identified; and Browning's genius, as we have seen, was in the end to be most truly denoted by these "mere escapes." With a few notable exceptions, they offer little to the student of Browning's ideology; they do not illustrate his theories of life, they disclose no good in evil and no hope in ill-success. But they are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer exempt from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a feast. He watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the detached, as it were professional, interest of a born "fighter." The loftier hatred, which is a form of love,--the sublime hatred of a Dante, the tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming hatred of a Heathcliff,--did not now, or ever, engage his imagination. The indignant invective against a political renegade, "Just for a handful of silver he left us," in which Browning spoke his own mind, is poor and uncharacteristic compared with pieces in which he stood aside and let some accomplished devil, like the Duke in _My last Duchess_, some clerical libertine, like the bishop of St Praxed's, some sneaking reptile, like the Spanish friar, some tiger-hearted Regan, like the lady of _The Laboratory_, or some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the girl of _The Confessional_, utter their callous cynicism or their deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. There was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in _Time's Revenges_, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her desire." He seized the grotesque side of persecution; and it is not fanciful to see in the delightful chronicle of the Nemesis inflicted upon "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis" a foretaste of the sardonic confessions of _Instans Tyrannus_. And he seized the element of sheer physical zest in even eager and impassioned action; the tramp of the march, the swing of the gallop in the fiery Cavalier Tunes, the crash of Gismond's "back--handed blow" upon Gauthier's mouth; the exultant lift of the "great pace" of the riders who bring the Good News.

Of love poetry, on the other hand, there was little in these first Lyrics and Romances. Browning had had warm friendships with women, and was singularly attractive to them; but at thirty-three love had at most sent a dancing ripple across the bright surface of his life, and it apparently counted for nothing in his dreams. His plans, as he told Miss Barrett, had been made without any thought of "finding such a one as you." That discovery introduced a new and unknown factor into his scheme of things. The love-poetry of the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances is still somewhat tentative and insecure. The beautiful fantasia _In a Gondola_ was directly inspired by a picture of his friend Maclise. He paints the romance of the lover's twilight tryst with all his incisive vigour; but his own pulse beats rather with the lover who goes forth at daybreak, and feels the kindling summons of the morning glory of sea and sunlight into the "world of men." His attitude to women is touched with the virginal reserve of the young Hippolytus, whose tragic fate he had told in the lofty _Prologue_ of Artemis. He approaches them with a kind of delicate and distant awe; tender, even chivalrous, but accentuating rather the reserves and reticences of chivalry than its rewards. The lady of _The Flower's Name_ is beautiful, but her beauty is only shyly hinted; we see no feature of face or form; only the fold of her dress brushing against the box border, the "twinkling" of her white fingers among the dark leaves. The typical lover of these lyrics is of a temperament in which feminine sensitiveness and masculine tenacity are characteristically blended; a temperament which the faintest and most fugitive signs of love--a word, a glance, the impalpable music of a romantic name--not only kindle and subdue, but permanently fortify and secure. _Cristina_, _Rudel_, and the _Lost Mistress_ stand in a line of development which culminates in _The Last Ride Together_. Cristina's lover has but "changed eyes" with her; but no queenly scorn of hers can undo the spiritual transformation which her glance has wrought:

"Her soul's mine; and thus, grown perfect, I shall pass my life's remainder."

The _Lost Mistress_ is an exquisitely tender and pathetic farewell, but not the stifled cry of a man who has received a crushing blow. Not easily, but yet without any ruinous convulsion, he makes that transition from love to "mere friendship" which passionate men so hardly endure.

The really tragic love-story was, for Browning, the story not of love rejected but of love flagging, fading, or crushed out.

"Never fear, but there's provision Of the devil's to quench knowledge Lest on earth we walk in rapture,"

Cristina's lover had bitterly reflected. Courts, as the focuses of social artifice and ceremonial restraint, were for him the peculiar breeding-places of such tragedies, and in several of the most incisive of the Lyrics and Romances he appears as the champion of the love they menace. The hapless _Last Duchess_ suffers for the largess of her kindly smiles. The duchess of _The Flight_ and the lady of _The Glove_ successfully revolt against pretentious substitutes for love offered in love's name. _The Flight_ is a tale, as Mrs Browning said, "with a great heart in it." Both the Gipsy-woman whose impassioned pleading we overhear, and the old Huntsman who reports it, are drawn from a domain of rough and simple humanity not very often trodden by Browning. The genial retainer admirably mediates between the forces of the Court which he serves and those of the wild primitive race to which his world-old calling as a hunter makes him kin; his hearty, untutored speech and character envelop the story like an atmosphere, and create a presumption that heart and nature will ultimately have their way. Even the hinted landscape-background serves as a mute chorus. In this "great wild country" of wide forests and pine-clad mountains, the court is the anomaly.

Similarly, in _The Glove_, the lion, so magnificently sketched by Browning, is made to bear out the inner expressiveness of the tale in a way anticipated by no previous teller. The lion of Schiller's ballad is already assuaged to his circumstances, and enters the arena like a courtier entering a drawing-room. Browning's lion, still terrible and full of the tameless passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing forehead, like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams: it is the irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental Nature which wakens in the lady the train of feeling and thought that impel her daring vindication of its claims.

* * * * *

Art was far from being as strange to the Browning of 1842-45 as love. But he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the Art-world with which love has least to do. He studies the egoisms of artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter Lutwyche showing "how he can hate"; the bishop of St Praxed's piteously bargaining on his death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli "which Gandolph shall not choose but see and burst"; the duke of the _Last Duchess_ displaying his wife's portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly disposing of her person. In a single poem only Browning touches those problems of the artist life which were to occupy him in the 'Fifties; and the _Pictor Ignotus_ is as far behind the _Andrea del_ _Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo Lippi_ in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and plasticity. Browning's sanguine and energetic temperament always inclined him to over-emphasis, and he has somewhat over-emphasised the anæmia of this anæmic soul. Rarely again did he paint in such resolute uniformity of ashen grey. The "Pictor" is the earliest, and the palest, of Browning's pale ascetics, who make, in one way or another, the great refusal, and lose their souls by trying to save them in a barrenness which they call purity.

The musician as such holds at this stage an even smaller place in Browning's art than the painter. None of these Lyrics foreshadows _Abt Vogler_ and _Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ as the _Pictor_ foreshadows _Lippi_ and _Del Sarto_. But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses and capabilities of music. He sings with peculiar _entrain_ of the transforming magic of song. The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities--the "careless rapture" repeated, the "minor third" _which only the cuckoo knows_. These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the power of music as _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ themselves. Orpheus, whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice verses on Eurydice. More to his mind was the legend of that motley Orpheus of the North, the Hamelin piper,--itself a picturesque motley of laughter and tears. The Gipsy's lay of far-off romance awakens the young duchess; Theocrite's "little human praise" wins God's ear, and Pippa's songs transform the hearts of men. A poet in this vein would fall naturally enough upon the Biblical story of the cure of the stricken Saul by the songs of the boy David. But a special influence drew Browning to this subject,--the wonderful _Song to David_ of Christopher Smart,--"a person of importance in his day," who owes it chiefly to Browning's enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours. Smart's David is before all things the glowing singer of the Joy of Earth,--the glory of the visible creation uttering itself in rapturous Praise of the Lord. And it is this David of whom we have a presentiment in the no less glowing songs with which Browning's shepherd-boy seeks to reach the darkened mind of Saul.

Of the poem we now possess, only the first nine sections belong to the present phase of Browning's work. These were confessedly incomplete, but Browning was content to let them go forth as they were, and less bent upon even their ultimate completion, it would seem, than Miss Barrett, who bade him "remember" that the poem was "there only as a first part, and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be a great lyrical work--now remember."[24] And the "next parts" when they came, in _Men and Women_, bore the mark of his ten years' fellowship with her devout and ecstatic soul, as well as of his own growth towards the richer and fuller harmonies of verse. The 1845 fragment falls, of course, far short of its sequel in imaginative audacity and splendour, but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty which Browning's busy intellectuality was too prone to dissipate. Kenyon read it nightly, as he told Mrs Browning, "to put his dreams in order"; finely comparing it to "Homer's Shield of Achilles, thrown into lyrical whirl and life." And certainly, if Browning anywhere approaches that Greek plasticity for which he cared so little, it is in these exquisitely sculptured yet breathing scenes. Then, as the young singer kindles to his work, his song, without becoming less transparent, grows more personal and impassioned; he no longer repeats the familiar chants of his tribe, but breaks into a new impetuous inspiration of his own; the lyrical whirl and life gathers swiftness and energy, and the delicate bas-reliefs of Saul's people, in their secular pieties of grief or joy, merge in the ecstatic vision of Saul himself, as he had once been, and as he might yet be, that

"boyhood of wonder and hope, Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,"

all the fulness and glory of the life of humanity gathered upon his single head. It is the very voice of life, which thrills and strikes across the spiritual darkness of Saul, as the coming of Hyperion scattered the shadows of Saturnian night.

[Footnote 24: _E.B.B. to R.B._, Dec. 10, 1845.]