An Introduction to the Study of Browning Part 8

but which serves for an ingenious, and apparently, as regards Gigadibs, a triumphant, defence; finally, there is the real personal element, the man as he is. We are quite at liberty to suppose, even if we were not bound to suppose, that after all Blougram's defence is merely or partly ironical, and that he is not the contemptible creature he would be if we took him quite seriously. It is no secret that Blougram himself is, in the main, modelled after and meant for Cardinal Wiseman, who, it is said, was the writer of a good-humoured review of the poem in the Catholic journal, _The Rambler_ (January, 1856). The supple, nervous strength and swiftness of the blank verse is, in its way, as fine as the qualities we have observed in the other monologues: there is a splendid "go" in it, a vast capacity for business; the verse is literally alive with meaning, packed with thought, instinct with wit and irony; and not this only, but starred with pa.s.sages of exquisite charm, such as that on "how some actor played Death on the stage," or that more famous one:--

"Just when we're safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides,-- And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul, Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring Round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- The grand Perhaps!"

At least six of the poems contained in _Men and Women_ deal with painting and music. But while four of these seem to fall into one group, the remaining two, _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo Lippi_, properly belong, though themselves the greatest of the art-poems as art-poems, to the group of monodramas already noticed. But _Old Pictures in Florence_, _The Guardian Angel_, _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ and _A Toccata of Galuppi's_, are chiefly and distinctively notable in their relation to art, or to some special picture or piece of music.

_The Guardian Angel_ is a "translation into song" of Guercino's picture of that name (_L'Angelo Custode_). It is addressed to "Waring," and was written by Browning at Ancona, after visiting with Mrs. Browning the church of San Agostino at Fano, which contains the picture. This touching and sympathetic little poem is Browning's only detailed description of a picture; but it is of more interest as an expression of personal feeling. Something in its sentiment has made it one of the most popular of his poems. _Old Pictures in Florence_ is a humorous and earnest moralising on the meaning and mission of art and the rights and wrongs of artists, suggested by some of the old pictures in Florence. It contains perhaps the most complete and particular statement of Browning's artistic principles that we have anywhere in his work, as well as a very n.o.ble and energetic outburst of indignant enthusiasm on behalf of the "early masters," the lesser older men whom the world slurs over or forgets. The principles which Browning imputes to the early painters may be applied to poetry as well as to art. Very characteristic and significant is the insistence on the deeper value of life, of soul, than of mere expression or technique, or even of mere unbreathing beauty. _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ is the humorous soliloquy of an imaginary organist over a fugue in F minor by an imaginary composer, named in the t.i.tle. It is a mingling of music and moralising. The famous description of a fugue, and the personification of its five voices, is a brilliantly ingenious _tour de force_; and the rough humour is quite in keeping with the _dramatis persona_. In complete contrast to _Master Hugues_ is _A Toccata of Galuppi's_,[31] one of the daintiest, most musical, most witching and haunting of Browning's poems, certainly one of his masterpieces as a lyric poet. It is a vision of Venice evoked from the shadowy Toccata, a vision of that delicious, brilliant, evanescent, worldly life, when

"b.a.l.l.s and masks began at midnight, burning ever to midday,"

and the lover and his lady would break off their talk to listen while Galuppi

"Sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord."

But "the eternal note of sadness" soon creeps in.

"Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned: 'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.

Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."

In this poem Browning has called up before us the whole aspect of Venetian life in the eighteenth century. In three other poems, among the most remarkable that he has ever written, _A Grammarian's Funeral_, _The Heretic's Tragedy_ and _Holy-Cross Day_, he has realised and represented the life and temper of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. _A Grammarian's Funeral_, "shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe," gives the n.o.bler spirit of the earlier pioneers of the Renaissance, men like Cyriac of Ancona and Filelfo, devoted pedants who broke ground in the restoration to the modern world of the civilisation and learning of ancient Greece and Rome. It gives this, the n.o.bler and earlier spirit, as finely as _The Tomb at St. Praxed's_ gives the later and grosser. In Browning's hands the figure of the old grammarian becomes heroic. "He settled _Hoti's_ business," true; but he did something more than that. It is the spirit in which the work is done, rather than the special work itself, here only relatively important, which is glorified. Is it too much to say that this is the n.o.blest of all requiems ever chanted over the grave of the scholar?

"Here's the top peak; the mult.i.tude below Live, for they can, there: This man decided not to Live but Know-- Bury this man there.

Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightnings are loosened, Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send!

Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, Living or dying."

The union of humour with intense seriousness, of the grotesque with the stately, is one that only Browning could have compa.s.sed, and the effect is singularly appropriate. As the disciples of the old humanist bear their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the steady climbing rhythm of their feet.

_The Heretic's Tragedy: a Middle-Age Interlude_, is described by the author as "a glimpse from the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay [last Grand-Master of the Templars], A.D. 1314, as distorted by the refraction from Flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple of centuries."

Of all Browning's mediaeval poems this is perhaps the greatest, as it is certainly the most original, the most astonis.h.i.+ng. Its special "note" is indescribable, for there is nothing with which we can compare it. If I say that it is perhaps the finest example in English poetry of the pure grotesque, I shall fail to interpret it aright to those who think of the grotesque as a synonym for the ugly and debased. If I call it fantastic, I shall do it less than justice in suggesting a certain lightness and flimsiness which are quite alien to its profound seriousness, a seriousness which touches on sublimity. Browning's power of sculpturing single situations is seldom shown in finer relief than in those poems in which he has seized upon some "occult eccentricity of history" or of legend, like this of _The Heretic's Tragedy_, or that in _Holy-Cross Day_, fas.h.i.+oning it into some quaint, curt, tragi-comic form.

_Holy-Cross Day_ expresses the feelings of the Jews, who were forced on this day (the 14th September) to attend an annual Christian sermon in Rome. A deliciously nave extract from an imaginary _Diary by the Bishop's Secretary_, 1600, first sets forth the orthodox view of the case; then the poem tells us "what the Jews really said." Nothing more audaciously or more sardonically mirthful was ever written than the first part of this poem, with its

"Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!

Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week;"

while the sudden transition to the sublime and steadfast Song of Death of Rabbi ben Ezra is an effect worthy of Heine: more than worthy. Heine would inevitably have put his tongue in his cheek again at the end.

With the three great mediaeval poems should be named the slighter sketch of _Protus_. The first and last lines, describing two imaginary busts, are a fine instance of Browning's power of translating sense into sound.

Compare the smooth and sweet melody of the opening lines--

"Among these latter busts we count by scores Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,

One loves a baby-face, with violets there-- Violets instead of laurels in the hair,-- As they were all the little locks could bear"--

with the rasping vigour and strength of sound which point the contrast of the conclusion:--

"Here's John the Smith's rough-hammered head. Great eye, Gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can To give you the crown-grasper. What a man!"

One poem of absolutely unique order is the romance of "_Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_." If it were not for certain lines, certain metaphors and images, here and there in his earlier works, we should find in this poem an exception to the rule of Browning's work so singular and startling as to be almost phenomenal. But in pa.s.sages of _Pauline_, of _Paracelsus_, of the lyric written in 1836, and incorporated, more than twenty years later, with _James Lee's Wife_, we have distinct evidence of a certain reserve, as it were, of romantic sensibility, a certain tendency, which we may consider to have been consciously checked rather than early exhausted, towards the weird and fanciful. In _Childe Roland_ all this latent sensibility receives full and final expression. The poem is very generally supposed to be an allegory, and a number of ingenious interpretations have been suggested, and the "Dark Tower" has been defined as Love, Life, Death and Truth.

But, as a matter of fact, Browning, in writing it, had no allegorical intention whatever. It was meant to be, and is, a pure romance. It was suggested by the line from Shakespeare which heads it, and was "built up," in Mrs. Orr's words "of picturesque impressions, which have separately or collectively produced themselves in the author's mind, ...

including a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room."[32] The poem depicts the last adventure of a knight vowed to the quest of a certain "Dark Tower." The description of his journey across a strange and dreadful country is one of the ghastliest and most vivid in all poetry; ghastly without hope, without alleviation, without a momentary touch of contrast; vivid and ghastly as the lines following:--

"A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes.

No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof--to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was rolled by, deterred no whit.

Which while I forded,--good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!

--It may have been a water-rat I speared But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek."

The manner of the poem, wholly unlike that of any other poem, may be described by varying Flaubert's phrase of "epic realism": it is romantic realism. The weird, fantastic and profoundly imaginative picture brought before us with such startling and almost oppressive vividness, is not painted in a style of vague suggestiveness, but in a hard, distinct, definite, realistic way, the realism which results from a faithful record of distorted impressions. The poet's imagination is like a flash of lightning which strikes through the darkness, flickering above the earth, and lighting up, point by point, with a momentary and fearful distinctness, the horrors of the landscape.

A large and important group of _Men and Women_ consists of love-poems, or poems dealing, generally in some concrete and dramatic way, sometimes in a purely lyrical manner, with the emotion of love. _Love among the Ruins_, a masterpiece of an absolutely original kind, is the idyl of a lover's meeting, in which the emotion is emphasised and developed by the contrast of its surroundings. The lovers meet in a turret among the ruins of an ancient city, and the moment chosen is immediately before their meeting, when the lover gazes around him, struck into sudden meditation by the vision of the mighty city fallen and of the living might of Love.

"And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills and undistinguished grey Melt away-- That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb Till I come.

For he looked upon the city, every side, Far and wide, All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'

Colonnades, All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then, All the men!

When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand, Either hand On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace Of my face, Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech Each on each.

In one year they sent a million fighters forth South and North, And they built their G.o.ds a brazen pillar high As the sky, Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force-- Gold, of course.

Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!

Earth's returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!

Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!

Love is best."

The quaint chime or tinkle of a metre made out of the cadence of sheep-bells renders with curious felicity the quietness and fervent meditation of the subject. _A Lovers' Quarrel_ is in every respect a contrast. It is a whimsical and delicious lyric, with a flowing and leaping melody, a light and piquant music deepened into pathos by a mournful undertone of retrospect and regret, not without a hope for the future. All Browning is seen in this pathetic gaiety, this eagerness and unrest and pa.s.sionate make-believe of a lover's mood. _Evelyn Hope_ strikes a tenderer note; it is one of Browning's sweetest, simplest and most pathetic pieces, and embodies, in a concrete form, one of his deepest convictions. It is the lament of a man, no longer young, by the death-bed of a young girl whom he has loved, unknown to her. She has died scarcely knowing him, not even suspecting his love. But what matter? G.o.d creates love to reward love, and there is another life to come.

"So hush,--I will give you this leaf to keep See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!

There, that is our secret: go to sleep!

You will wake, and remember, and understand."

_A Woman's Last Word_ is an exquisite little lyric which sings itself to its own music of delicate gravity and gentle pathos; but it too holds, in its few small lines, a complete situation, that most pathetic one in which a woman resolves to merge her individuality in the wish and will of her husband, to bind, for his sake, her intellect in the chains of her heart.

"A WOMAN'S LAST WORD.

I.

Let's contend no more, Love, Strive nor weep: All be as before, Love, --Only sleep!

II.

What so wild as words are?

I and thou In debate, as birds are, Hawk on bough!