An Introduction to the Study of Browning Part 11

VI.

Only, there was a way ... you crept Close by the side, to dodge Eyes in the house, two eyes except: They styled their house 'The Lodge.'

VII.

What right had a lounger up their lane?

But, by creeping very close, With the good wall's help,--their eyes might strain And stretch themselves to Oes,

VIII.

Yet never catch her and me together, As she left the attic, there, By the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,'

And stole from stair to stair,

IX.

And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas, We loved, sir,--used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was-- But then, how it was sweet!"

_A Likeness_ forms a third, and a good third, to these two fine and subtle studies of modern English life. It is one of those poems which, because they seem simple and superficial, and can be galloped off the tongue in a racing jingle, we are apt to underrate or overlook. Yet it would be difficult to find a more vivid bit of _genre_ painting than the three-panelled picture in this single frame.

The three blank verse poems which complete the series of purely dramatic pieces, _A Death in the Desert, Caliban upon Setebos_ and _Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"_ are more elaborate than any yet named. They follow, to a considerable extent, the form of the blank verse monologues which are the glory of _Men and Women_. Alike in their qualities and defects they represent a further step in development. The next step will lead to the elaborate and extended monologues which comprise the greater part of Browning's later works.

A _Death in the Desert_ is an argument in a dramatic frame-work. The situation imaged is that of the mysterious death of St. John in extreme old age. The background to the last utterance of the apostle is painted with marvellous brilliance and tenderness: every circ.u.mstance is conceived and represented in that pictorial style, in which a word is equal to a touch of the brush of a great painter. But, delicately as the circ.u.mstances and surroundings are indicated, it is as an argument that the poem is mainly left to exist. The bearing of this argument on contemporary theories may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish.

To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future, no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen scepticism.

In style, the poem a little recalls _Cleon_; with less of harmonious grace and clear cla.s.sic outline, it possesses a certain stilled sweetness, a meditative tenderness, all its own, and certainly appropriate to the utterance of the "beloved disciple."

_Caliban upon Setebos_; or, _Natural Theology In the Island_,[37] is more of a creation, and a much greater poem, than _A Death in the Desert_. It is sometimes forgotten that the grotesque has its own region in art. The region of the grotesque has been well defined, in connection with this poem, in a paper read by Mr. Cotter Morison before the Browning Society. "Its proper province," he writes, "would seem to be the exhibition of fanciful power by the artist; not beauty or truth in the literal sense at all, but inventive affluence of unreal yet absurdly comic forms, with just a flavour of the terrible added, to give a grim dignity, and save from the triviality of caricature."[38] With the exception of _The Heretic's Tragedy_, _Caliban upon Setebos_ is probably the finest piece of grotesque art in the language. Browning's Caliban, unlike Shakespeare's, has no active part to play: if he has ever seen Stephano and Trinculo, he has forgotten it. He simply sprawls on the ground "now that the heat of day is best," and expounds for himself, for his own edification, his system of Natural Theology. I think Huxley has said that the poem is a truly scientific representation of the development of religious ideas in primitive man. It needed the subtlest of poets to apprehend and interpret the undeveloped ideas and sensations of a rudimentary and transitionally human creature like Caliban, to turn his dumb stirrings of quaint fancies into words, and to do all this without a discord. The finest poetical effect is in the close: it is indeed one of the finest effects, climaxes, _surprises_, in literature.

Caliban has been venturing to talk rather disrespectfully of his G.o.d; believing himself overlooked, he has allowed himself to speak out his mind on religious questions. He chuckles to himself in safe self-complacency. All at once--

"What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!

Crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes, There scuds His raven that hath told Him all!

It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move, And fast invading fires begin! White blaze-- A tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to jibe at Him!

Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!

'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!"

_Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"_ is equally remote from both the other poems in blank verse. It is a humorous and realistic tale of modern spiritualism, suggested, it is said, by the life and adventures of the American medium, Home. Like _Bishop Blougram_, it is at once an exposure and an apologia. As a piece of a.n.a.lytic portraiture it would be difficult to surpa.s.s; and it is certainly a fault on the right side if the poet has endowed his precious blackguard with a dialectical head hardly to be expected on such shoulders; if, in short, he has made him nearly as clever as himself. When the critics complain that the characters of a novelist are too witty, the characters of a poet too profound, one cannot but feel thankful that it is once in a while possible for such strictures to be made. The style of _Mr. Sludge_ is the very acme of colloquialism. It is not "what is commonly understood by poetry," certainly: but is it not poetry, all the same? If such a character as Sludge should be introduced into poetry at all, it is certain that no more characteristic expression could have been found for him. But should he be dealt with? We limit our poetry nowadays, to the length of our own tether; if we are unable to bring beauty out of every living thing, merely because it is alive, and because nature is beautiful in every movement, is it our own fault or nature's?

Shakespeare and his age trusted nature, and were justified; in our own age only Browning has wholly trusted nature.

Scarcely second in importance to the dramatic group, comes the group of lyrical poems, some of which are indeed, formally dramatic, that is, the "utterance of so many imaginary persons," but still in general tone and effect lyrical and even personal. _Abt Vogler_ for instance, and _Rabbi ben Ezra_, might no doubt be considered instances of "vicarious thinking" on behalf of the modern German composer and the mediaeval Jewish philosopher. But in neither case is there any distinct dramatic intention. The one is a deep personal utterance on music, the other a philosophy of life. But before I touch on these, which, with _Prospice_, are the most important and impressive of the remaining poems, I should name the two or three lesser pieces, the exquisite and pregnant little elegy of love and mourning, _May and Death; A Face_, with its perfect clearness and fineness of suggestive portraiture, as lovely as the vignettes of Palma in _Sordello_, or as a real picture of the "Tuscan's early art"; the two octaves (not in the first edition) on Woolner's group of Constance and Arthur (_Deaf and Dumb_) and Sir Frederick Leighton's picture of _Eurydice and Orpheus_; and the two semi-narrative poems, _Gold Hair: a Story of p.o.r.nic_, and _Apparent Failure_, the former a vivid rendering of the strange story told in Brittany of a beautiful girl-miser, the latter a record and its stinging and consoling moral ("Poor men, G.o.d made, and all for that!") of a visit that Browning paid in 1850 to the Morgue.

_Abt Vogler_[39] ("after he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention") is an utterance on music which perhaps goes further than any attempt which has ever been made in verse to set forth the secret of the most sacred and illusive of the arts. Only the wonderful lines in the _Merchant of Venice_ come anywhere near it. The wonder and beauty of it grow on one, as the wonder and beauty of a sky, of a sea, of a landscape, beautiful indeed and wonderful from the first, become momentarily more evident, intense and absorbing. Life, religion and music, the _Ganzen, Guten, Schonen_ of existence, are combined in threefold unity, apprehended and interpreted in their essential spirit.

"Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?

Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!

What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same!

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The pa.s.sion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to G.o.d by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by.

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?

Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?

Why rushed the discord in, but that harmony should be prized?

Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: But G.o.d has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."

In _Rabbi ben Ezra_ Browning has crystallized his religious philosophy into a shape of abiding beauty. It has been called, not rashly, the n.o.blest of modern religious poems. Alike in substance and in form it belongs to the highest order of meditative poetry; and it has, in Browning's work, an almost unique quality of grave beauty, of severe restraint, of earnest and measured enthusiasm. What the _Psalm of Life_ is to the people who do not think, _Rabbi ben Ezra_ might and should be to those who do: a light through the darkness, a lantern of guidance and a beacon of hope, to the wanderers lost and weary in the _selva selvaggia_. It is one of those poems that mould character. I can give only one or two of its most characteristic verses.

"Not on the vulgar ma.s.s Called 'work' must sentence pa.s.s, Things done, that took the eye and had the price; O'er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

But all, the world's coa.r.s.e thumb And finger failed to plumb, So pa.s.sed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:

Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me.

This, I was worth to G.o.d, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"

The emotion and the measure of _Rabbi ben Ezra_ have the chastened, sweet gravity of wise old age. _Prospice_ has all the impetuous blood and fierce lyric fire of militant manhood. It is a cry of pa.s.sionate exultation and exaltation in the very face of death: a war-cry of triumph over the last of foes. I would like to connect it with the quotation from Dante which Browning, in a published letter, tells us that he wrote in his wife's Testament after her death: "Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pa.s.s to another better, there, where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamoured." If _Rabbi ben Ezra_ has been excelled as a Song of Life, then _Prospice_ may have been excelled as a Hymn of Death.

"PROSPICE.

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face, When the snows begin, and the blasts denote I am nearing the place, The power of the night, the press of the storm, The post of the foe; Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, Yet the strong man must go; For the journey is done and the summit attained, And the barriers fall, Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers The heroes of old, Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears Of pain, darkness and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, The black minute's at end, And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with G.o.d be the rest!"

Last of all comes the final word, the summary or conclusion of the whole matter, in the threefold speech of the _Epilogue_, a comprehensive and suggestive vision of the religious life of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 36: The first six stanzas of the sixth section of this poem, the splendid song of the wind, were published in a magazine, as _Lines_, in 1836. Parts II. & III., of Section VIII. (except the last two lines) were added to the poem in 1868.]

[Footnote 37: The poem was originally preceded by the text, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself" (_Ps._ 1. 21).]

[Footnote 38: _Browning Society's Papers_, Part V., p. 493.]

[Footnote 39: The Abt or Abbe George Joseph Vogler (born at Wurzburg, Bavaria, in 1749, died at Darmstadt, 1824) was a composer, professor, kapelmeister and writer on music. Among his pupils were Weber and Meyerbeer. The "musical instrument of his invention" was called an orchestrion. "It was," says Sir G. Grove, "a very compact organ, in which four keyboards of five octaves each, and a pedal board of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were packed into a cube of nine feet."--(See Miss Marx's "Account of Abbe Vogler," in the _Browning Society's Papers_, Part III., p. 339).]

17. THE RING AND THE BOOK.

[Published, in 4 vols., in 1868-9: Vol. I., November, 1868; Vol. II., December, 1868; Vol. III., January, 1869; Vol. IV., February, 1869. In 12 Books: 1., The Ring and the Book; II., Half-Rome; III., The Other Half-Rome; IV., Tertium Quid; V., Count Guido Franceschini; VI., Giuseppe Caponsacchi; VII., Pompilia; VIII., Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Pauperum Procurator; IX., Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius, Fisci et Rev. Cam. Apostol. Advocatus; X., The Pope; XI., Guido; XII., The Book and the Ring. (_Poetical Works_, 1889; Vols. VIII.-X.)]