Robert Browning Part 13

Looks old, fantastic and impossible: I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.

Two possessions, out of what life has brought, remain with her--the babe, who while yet unborn had converted her from a sufferer to a defender, and the friend who has saved her soul. Even motherhood itself is not the deepest thing in Pompilia's nature. The little Gaetano, whom she had held in her arms for three days, will change; he will grow great, strong, stern, a tall young man, who cannot guess what she was like, who may some day have some hard thought of her. He too withdraws into the dream of earth. She can never lose him, and yet lose him she surely must; all she can do is by dying to give him "out-right to G.o.d, without a further care," so to be safe. But one experience of Pompilia's life was quite out of time, and belongs by its mere essence to eternity.

Having laid her babe away with G.o.d, she must not even "think of him again, for grat.i.tude"; and her last breath shall spend itself in doing service to earth by striving to make men know aright what earth will for a time possess and then, forever, heaven--G.o.d's servant, man's friend, the saviour of the weak, the foe of all who are vile--and to the gossips of Arezzo and of Rome the fribble and c.o.xcomb and light-of-love priest, Caponsacchi.

If any point in the whole long poem, _The Ring and the Book_, can be described as central, it must be found in the relations, each to the other, of Caponsacchi and Pompilia. The truth of it, as conceived by Browning, could hardly be told otherwise than in poetry, for it needs the faith that comes through spiritual beauty to render it comprehensible and credible, and such beauty is best expressed by art.

It is easy to convince the world of a pa.s.sion between the s.e.xes which is simply animal; nor is art much needed to help out the proof. Happily the human love, in which body and soul play in varying degrees their parts, and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread. But the love that is wholly spiritual seems to some a supernatural thing, and if it be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing phantom-like, tenuous, and cold. But, in truth, this reality once experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an ardour as pa.s.sionate as any that is known to man. Its special note is a deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in religious conversion; when Bunyan, for example, ceased from the efforts to establish his own righteousness and saw that righteousness above him in the eternal heavens, he walked as a man suddenly illuminated, and could hardly forbear telling his joy to the crows upon the plough-land; and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real alt.i.tude.

If a poet can succeed in lifting up our hearts so that they may know for actual the truth of these things, he has contributed an important fragment towards an interpretation of human life. And this Browning has a.s.suredly done. The sense of a power outside oneself whose influence invades the just-awakened man, the conviction that the secret of life has been revealed, the lying pa.s.sive and p.r.o.ne to the influx of the spirit, the illumination, the joy, the a.s.surance that old things have pa.s.sed away and that all things have become new, the acceptance of a supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire immolation--these are rendered by Browning with a fidelity which if reached solely by imagination is indeed surprising, for who can discover these mysteries except through a personal experience?[101] If the senses co-operate--as perhaps they do--in such mysteries, they are senses in a state of transfiguration, senses taken up into the spirit--"Whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell." When Caponsacchi bears the body of Pompilia in a swoon to her chamber in the inn at Castelnuovo, it is as if he bore the host. From the first moment when he set eyes upon her in the theatre,

A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad,

he is delivered from his frivolous self, he is solemnized and awed; the form of his wors.h.i.+p is self-sacrifice; his first word to her--"I am yours "--is

An eternity Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth O' the soul that then broke silence.

To abstain from ever seeing her again would be joy more than pain if this were duty to her and to G.o.d. For him the mere revelation of Pompilia would suffice. His inmost feeling is summed up with perfect adequacy in a word to the Judges: "You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith."

There is another kind of faith which comes not suddenly through pa.s.sion but slowly through thought and action and trial, and the long fidelity of a life. It is that of which Milton speaks in the lines:

Till old experience do attain To something of Prophetic strain.

This is the faith of Browning's Pope Innocent, who up to extreme old age has kept open his intelligence both on the earthward and the G.o.dward sides, and who, being wholly delivered from self by that devotion to duty which is the habit of his mind, can apprehend the truth of things and p.r.o.nounce judgment upon them almost with the cert.i.tude of an instrument of the divine righteousness. And yet he is entirely human, G.o.d's vicegerent and also an old man, learned in the secrets of the heart, patient in the inquisition of facts, weighing his doc.u.ments, scrutinising each fragment of evidence, burdened by the sense of responsibility, cheered also by the opportunity of true service, grave but not sad--

Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute, With prudence, probity and--what beside From the other world he feels impress at times;

a "grey ultimate decrepitude," yet visited by the spiritual fire which touches a soul whose robe of flesh is worn thin; not una.s.sailed by doubts as to the justice of his final decision, but a.s.sured that his part is confidently to make the best use of the powers with which he has been entrusted; young of heart, if also old, in his rejoicing in goodness and his antipathy to evil.

_The Ring and the Book_ is a great receptacle into which Browning poured, with an affluence that perhaps is excessive, all his powers--his searchings for truth, his pa.s.sion, his casuistry, his feeling for beauty, his tenderness, his gift of pity, his veiled memories of what was most precious in the past, his hopes for the future, his worldly knowledge, his unworldly aspirations, his humour, such as it was, robust rather than delicate. Could the three monologues which tell how in various ways it strikes a Roman contemporary have been fused into a single dialogue, could the speeches of the two advocates have been briefly set over, one against the other, instead of being drawn out at length, we might still have got the whole of Browning's mind. But we must take things as we find them, and perhaps a skilled writer knows his own business best. Never was Browning's mastery in narrative displayed with such effect as in Caponsacchi's account of the flight to Rome, which is not mere record, but record winged with lyrical enthusiasm.

Never was his tenderness so deep or poignant as in his realisation of the motherhood of Pompilia. Never were the gropings of intellect and the intuitions of the spirit shown by him in their weakness and their strength with such a lucid subtlety as in the deliberations and decisions of the Pope. The whole poem which he compares to a ring was the ring of a strong male finger; but the posy of the ring, and the comparison is again his own, tells how it was a gift hammered and filed during the years of smithcraft "in memoriam"; in memory and also with a hope.

The British Public, whom Browning addresses at the close of his poem, and who "liked him not" during so many years, now when he was not far from sixty went over to his side. _The Ring and the Book_ almost immediately pa.s.sed into a second edition. The decade from 1869 onwards is called by Mrs Orr the fullest period in Browning's life. His social occupations and entertainments both in London and for a time as a visitor at country-houses became more numerous and absorbing, yet he had energy for work as well as for play. During these ten years no fewer than nine new volumes of his poetry appeared. None of them are London poems, and Italy is for the present almost forgotten; it is the scene of only two or three short pieces, which are included in the volume of 1876--_Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper; with other Poems_.

The other pieces of the decade as regards their origin fall with a single exception into two groups; first those of ancient Greece, suggested by Browning's studies in cla.s.sical drama; secondly those, which in a greater or less degree, are connected with his summer wanderings in France and Switzerland. The dream-scene of Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau is Leicester Square; but this also is one of the poems of France. _The Inn Alb.u.m_ alone is English in its characters and their surroundings. Such a grouping of the works of the period is of a superficial nature, and it can be readily dismissed. It brings into prominence, however, the fact that Browning, while resolved to work out what was in him, lay open to casual suggestions. He had acquired certain methods which he could apply to almost any topic. He had confidence that any subject on which he concentrated his powers of mind could be compelled to yield material of interest. It cannot be said that he exercised always a wise discretion in the choice of subjects; these ought to have been excellent in themselves; he trusted too much to the successful issue of the play of his own intellect and imagination around and about his subjects. _The Ring and the Book_ had given him practice, extending over several years, in handling the large dramatic monologue.

Now he was prepared to stretch the dramatic monologue beyond the bounds, and new devices were invented to keep it from stagnating and to carry it forward. Imaginary disputants intervene in the monologue; there are objections, replies, retorts; a second player in the game not being found, the speaker has to play against himself.

In the story of the Roman murder-case fancy was mingled with fact, and truth with falsehood, with a view to making truth in the end the more salient. The poet had used to the full his dramatic right of throwing himself into intellectual sympathy with persons towards whom he stood in moral antagonism or at least experienced an inward sense of alienation.

The characteristic of much of his later poetry is that it is for ever tasking falsehood to yield up truth, for ever (to employ imagery of his own) as a swimmer beating the treacherous water with the feet in order that the head may rise higher into the pure air made for the spirit's breathing. Browning's genius united an intellect which delighted in the investigation of complex problems with a spiritual and emotional nature manifesting itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it united an a.n.a.lytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an intuitive power springing from the heart. He employed his brain to twist and tangle a Gordian knot in order that in a moment it might be cut with the sword of the spirit. In the earlier poems his spiritual ardours and intuitions were often present throughout, and without latency, without reserve; impa.s.sioned truth often flashed upon the reader through no intervening or resisting medium. In _The Ring and the Book_, and in a far greater degree in some subsequent poems, while the supreme authority resides in the spiritual intuitions or the pa.s.sions of the heart, their instantaneous, decisive work waits until a prolonged casuistry has accomplished its utmost; falsehood seems almost more needful in the process of the poet than truth. And yet it is never actually so. Rather to the poet, as a moral explorer, it appeared a kind of cowardice to seek truth only where it may easily be found; the strenuous hunter will track it through all winding ways of error; it is thrown out as a spot of intense illumination upon a background of darkness; it leaps forth as the flash of the search-light piercing through a mist. The masculine characters in the poems are commonly made the exponents of Browning's intellectual casuistry--a Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau, an Aristophanes; and they are made to say the best and the most truthful words that can be uttered by such as they are and from such positions as theirs; the female characters, a Balaustion, the Lady of Sorrows in _The Inn Alb.u.m_, and others are often revealers of sudden truth, which with them is either a divine revelation--the vision seen from a higher and clearer standpoint--or a dictate of pure human pa.s.sion. Eminent moments in life had an extraordinary interest for Browning--moments when life, caught up out of the habitual ways and the lower levels of prudence, takes its guidance and inspiring motive from an immediate discovery of truth through some n.o.ble ardour of the heart. Therefore it did not seem much to him to task his ingenuity through almost all the pages of a laborious book in creating a tangle and embroilment of evil and good, of truth and falsehood, in view of the fact that a s.h.i.+ning moment is at last to spring forward and do its work of severing absolutely and finally right from wrong, and shame from a splendour of righteousness. Browning's readers longed at times, and not without cause, for the old directness and the old pervading presence of spiritual and impa.s.sioned truth.[102]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 93: Letter to Miss Blagden, Feb. 24, 1870, given by Mrs Orr, p. 287.]

[Footnote 94: Vivid descriptions of Le Croisic at an earlier date may be found in one of Balzac's short stories.]

[Footnote 95: _Life of Jowett_ by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, i.

400, 401.]

[Footnote 96: A repeated invitation in 1877 was also declined. In 1875 Browning was nominated by the Independent Club to the office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.]

[Footnote 97: Such a book would naturally attract Browning, who, like his father, had an interest in celebrated criminal cases. In his _Memories_ (p. 338), Kegan Paul records his surprise at a dinner-party where the conversation turned on murder, to find Browning acquainted "to the minutest detail" with every _cause celebre_ of that kind within living memory.]

[Footnote 98: _An Artist's Reminiscences_, by R. Lehmann (1894), p.

224.]

[Footnote 99: Rossetti Papers, p. 302.]

[Footnote 100: So the story was told by Dante Rossetti, as recorded by Mrs Gilchrist; she says that she believed the story was told of himself by Carlyle.]

[Footnote 101: The pa.s.sage specially referred to is in Caponsacchi's monologue, II. 936-973, beginning with "Thought? nay, sirs, what shall follow was not thought."]

[Footnote 102: I have used here some pa.s.sages already printed in my _Studies in Literature_.]

Chapter XIII

Poems on Cla.s.sical Subjects

During these years, 1869-1878, Browning's outward life maintained its accustomed ways. In the summer of 1869 he wandered with his son and his sister, in company with his friends of Italian days, the Storys, in Scotland, and at Lock Luichart Lodge visited Lady Ashburton.[103] Three summers, those of 1870, 1872 and 1873 were spent at Saint-Aubin, a wild "un-Murrayed" village on the coast of Normandy, where Milsand occupied a little cottage hard by. At night the light-house of Havre shot forth its beam, and it was with "a thrill" that Browning saw far off the spot where he had once sojourned with his wife.[104] "I don't think we were ever quite so thoroughly washed by the sea-air from all quarters as here," he wrote in August 1870. Every morning, as Mme. Blanc (Th.

Bentzon) tells us, he might be seen "walking along the sands with the small Greek copy of Homer which was his constant companion. On Sunday he went with the Milsands ... to a service held in the chapel of the Chateau Blagny, at Lion-sur-Mer, for the few Protestants of that region.

They were generally accompanied by a young Huguenot peasant, their neighbour, and Browning with the courtesy he showed to every woman, used to take a little bag from the hands of the strong Norman girl, notwithstanding her entreaties." The visit of 1870 was saddened by the knowledge of what France was suffering during the progress of the war.

He lingered as long as possible for the sake of comrades.h.i.+p with Milsand, around whose shoulder Browning's arm would often lie as they walked together on the beach.[105] But communication with England became daily more and more difficult. Milsand insisted that his friend should instantly return. It is said by Mme. Blanc that Browning was actually suspected by the peasants of a neighbouring village of being a Prussian spy. Not without difficulty he and his sister reached Honfleur, where an English cattle-boat was found preparing to start at midnight for Southampton.

Two years later Miss Thackeray was also on the coast of Normandy and at no great distance. "It was a fine hot summer," she writes, "with sweetness and completeness everywhere; the cornfields gilt and far-stretching, the waters blue, the skies arching high and clear, and the sunsets succeeding each other in most glorious light and beauty."

Some slight misunderstanding on Browning's part, the fruit of mischief-making gossipry, which caused constraint between him and his old friend was cleared away by the good offices of Milsand. While Miss Thackeray sat writing, with shutters closed against the blazing sun, Browning himself "dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella under his arm," arrived to take her hand with all his old cordiality. A meeting of both with the Milsands, then occupying a tiny house in a village on the outer edges of Luc-sur-mer, soon followed, and before the sun had fallen that evening they were in Browning's house upon the cliff at Saint-Aubin. "The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table. Mr Browning told us it was the only book he had with him. The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but I remember a little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practise in the early morning. I heard Mr Browning declare they were perfectly satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a sponge, were only ready for fresh air."[106] Perhaps Browning's "only book" of 1872 contained the dramas of aeschylus, for at Fontainebleau where he spent some later weeks of the year these were the special subject of his study. It was at Saint-Aubin in 1872 that he found the materials for his poem of the following year, and to Miss Thackeray's drowsy name for the district,

Symbolic of the place and people too,

_White Cotton Night-Cap Country_, the suggestion of Browning's t.i.tle _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is due. To her the poem is dedicated.

Browning's interest in those who were rendered homeless and dest.i.tute in France during the Prussian invasion was shown in a practical way in the spring of 1871. He had for long been averse to the publication of his poems in magazines and reviews. In 1864 he had gratified his American admirers by allowing _Gold Hair_ and _Prospice_ to appear in the _Atlantic Monthly_ previous to their inclusion in _Dramatis Persona._ A fine sonnet written in 1870, suggested by the tower erected at Clandeboye by Lord Dufferin in memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of Gifford, had been inserted in some undistributed copies of a pamphlet, "Helen's Tower," privately printed twenty years previously; the sonnet was published at the close of 1883 in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, but was not given a place by Browning in the collected editions of his Poetical Works. In general he felt that the miscellaneous contents of a magazine, surrounding a poem, formed hardly an appropriate setting for such verse as his. In February 1871, however, he offered to his friend and, publisher Mr Smith the ballad of _Herve Riel_ for use in the _Cornhill Magazine_ of March, venturing for once, as he says, to puff his wares and call the verses good. His purpose was to send something to the distressed people of Paris, and one hundred guineas, the sum liberally fixed by Mr Smith as the price of the poem, were duly forwarded--the gift of the English poet and his Breton hero. The facts of the story had been forgotten and were denied at St Malo; the reports of the French Admiralty were examined and indicated the substantial accuracy of the poem. On one point Browning erred; it was not a day's holiday to be spent with his wife "la Belle Aurore" which the Breton sailor pet.i.tioned for as the reward of his service, but a "conge absolu," the holiday of a life-time. In acknowledging his error to Dr Furnivall, and adding an explanation of its cause, he dismissed the subject with the word, "Truth above all things; so treat the matter as you please."[107]

For the purposes of holiday-making the resources of the northern French coast, with which Browning's ballad of the Croisickese pilot is a.s.sociated, were, says Mrs Orr, becoming exhausted. Yet some rest and refreshment after the heavy tax upon his strength made by a London season with its various claims were essential to his well-being. His pa.s.sion for music would not permit him during his residence in town to be absent from a single important concert; the extraordinary range of his acquaintance with the works of great and even of obscure composers was attested by Halle. In his sonnet of 1884, inscribed in the Alb.u.m to Mr Arthur Chappell, _The Founder of the Feast_, a poem not included in any edition of his works, he recalls these evenings of delight:

Sense has received the utmost Nature grants, My cup was filled with rapture to the brim, When, night by night--ah, memory, how it haunts!-- Music was poured by perfect ministrants, By Halle, Schumann, Piatti, Joachim.

Long since in Florence he had become acquainted with Miss Egerton-Smith, who loved music like himself, and was now often his companion at public performances in London. She was wealthy, and with too little confidence in her power to win the regard of others, she lived apart from the great world. In 1872 Browning lost the warm-hearted and faithful friend who had given him such prompt, womanly help in his worst days of grief--Miss Blagden. Her place in his memory remained her own. Miss Egerton-Smith might seem to others wanting in strength of feeling and cordiality of manner. Browning knew the sensitiveness of her nature, which responded to the touch of affection, and he could not fail to discover her true self, veiled though it was by a superficial reserve. And as he knew her, so he wrote of her in the opening of his _La Saisiaz_:

You supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world: May be! flower that's full-blown tempts the b.u.t.terfly, not flower that's furled.

But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand --Maybe throb of heart, beneath which,--quickening farther than it knew,-- Treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue.

Disembosomed, re-embosomed,--must one memory suffice, Prove I knew an Alpine rose which all beside named Edelweiss?

Miss Egerton-Smith was the companion and house-mate of Browning and his sister in their various summer wanderings from 1874 to 1877. In the first of these years the three friends occupied a house facing the sea at the village of Mers near Treport. Browning at this time was much absorbed by his _Aristophanes' Apology_. "Here," writes Mrs Orr, "with uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set off on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind, which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall." The following summers were spent at Villers in Normandy (1875), at the Isle of Arran (1876), and in the upland country of the Saleve, near Geneva. During the visit to the Saleve district, where Browning and his sister with Miss Egerton-Smith occupied a chalet named La Saisiaz, he was, Mrs Orr tells us, "unusually depressed and unusually disposed to regard the absence from home as a banishment." Yet the place seemed lovely to him in its solitude and its beauty; the prospect of Geneva, with lake and plain extended below, varying in appearance with the s.h.i.+fting of clouds, was repose to his sense of sight. He bathed twice each day in the mountain stream--"a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees." He read and rested; and wrote but little or not at all. Suddenly the repose of La Saisiaz was broken up; the mood of languorous pleasure and drowsy discontent was at an end. While preparing to join her friend on a long-intended mountain climb Miss Egerton-Smith, with no forewarning, died. The shock was for a time overwhelming. When Browning returned to London the poem _La Saisiaz_, the record of his inquisition into the mystery of death, of his inward debate concerning a future life, was written. It was the effort of resilience in his spirit in opposition to that stroke which deprived him of the friend who was so near and dear.

The grouping of the works produced by Browning from the date of the publication of _The Ring and the Book_ (1868) to the publication of _La Saisias_ (1878), which is founded upon the occasions that suggested them, has only an external and historical interest. The studies in the Greek drama and the creations to which these gave rise extend at intervals over the whole decade. _Balaustion's Adventure_ was published in 1871, _Aristophanes' Apology_ in 1875, the translation of _The Agamemnon of aeschylus_ in 1877. Two of the volumes of this period, _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_ (1871) and _Fifine at the Fair_ (1872) are casuistical monologues, and these, it will be observed, lie side by side in the chronological order. The first of the pair is concerned with public and political life, with the conduct and character of a man engaged in the affairs of state; the second, with a domestic question, the casuistry of wedded fidelity and infidelity, from which the scope of the poem extends itself to a wider survey of human existence and its meanings.[108] Two of the volumes are narrative poems, each tending to a tragic crisis; _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ (1873) is a story entangled with questions relating to religion; _The Inn Alb.u.m_ (1875) is a tragedy of the pa.s.sion of love. The volume of 1876, _Pacchiarotto with other Poems_, is the miscellaneous gathering of lyrical and narrative pieces which had come into being during a period of many years. Finally in _La Saisiaz_ Browning, writing in his own person, records the experience of his spirit in confronting the problem of death. But it was part of his creed that the gladness of life may take hands with its grief, that the poet who would live mightily must live joyously; and in the volume which contained his poem of strenuous and virile sorrow he did not refrain from including a second piece, _The two Poets of Croisic_, which has in it much matter of honest mirth, and closes with the declaration that the test of greatness in an artist lies in his power of converting his more than common sufferings into a more than common joy.

_Balaustion's Adventure_, dedicated to the Countess Cowper by whom the transcript from Euripides was suggested, or, as Browning will have it, prescribed, proved, as the dedication declares, "the most delightful of May-month amus.e.m.e.nts" in the spring of 1871. It was the happiest of thoughts to give the version of Euripides' play that setting which has for its source a pa.s.sage at the close of Plutarch's life of Nicias. The favours bestowed by the Syracusans upon Athenian slaves and fugitives who could delight them by reciting or singing the verses of Euripides is not to be marvelled at, says Plutarch, "weying a reporte made of a s.h.i.+p of the city of Caunus, that on a time being chased thether by pyrates, thinking to save themselves within their portes, could not at the first be received, but had repulse: howbeit being demaunded whether they could sing any of Euripides songes, and aunswering that they could, were straight suffered to enter, and come in."[109] From this root blossomed Browning's romance of the Rhodian girl, who saves her country folk and wins a lover and a husband by her delight in the poetry of one who was more highly honoured abroad than in his own Athens. Perhaps Browning felt that an ardent girl would be the best interpreter of the womanly heroism and the pathos of "that strangest, saddest, sweetest song," of Euripides. Of all its author's dramas the Alkestis is the most appropriate to the occasion, for it is the poem of a great deliverance from death, and here in effect it delivers from death, or worse, the fugitives from the pirate-bark, "at destruction's very edge," who are the suppliants to Syracuse. In accepting the task imposed upon him Browning must have felt that no other play of Euripides could so entirely have borne out the justice of the characterisation of the poet by Mrs Browning in the lines which he prefixed to _Balaustions Adventure_: