Robert Browning by C. H. Herford

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"She has lost me, I have gained her,
Her soul's mine, and now grown perfect
I shall pass my life's remainder."

Forty years later, Browning told with far greater realistic power and a
grim humour suited to the theme, the "transmutation" of Ned Bratts.
Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of
Abib:--

"The very God! Think, Abib, dost thou think,--
So the All-great were the All-loving too"--

and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more splendid vision
breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying Paracelsus, and he
has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his
darkened chamber crying that--

"Spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June,--when harebells grow,
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to me."

But it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that
Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A
whole class of his characters--the most familiarly "Browningesque"
division of them all--was shaped under the sway of this master-passion;
the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail,
baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on
stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of _Old
Painters in Florence_, and _The Last Ride Together_, and _The Lost
Mistress_; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for
want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the _Statue and
the Bust_, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter. But his very
preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his
peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No kind of vivid
consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of
the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little,
compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving,
rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the
lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects
of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of
the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at
the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into
"an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush,
strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these
songsters,--the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's
wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could
recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's
poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing;
the intolerable pathos of _Ye Banks and Braes_, or of

"We twa hae paidl't in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,"

belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like
Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest
him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as
in _The Confessional_, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated
spirit, as in _Any Wife to any Husband_, or _A Woman's Last Word_; or
into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in _The Worst
of It_ or _James Lee's Wife_. And happiness, equally,--even the lover's
happiness,--needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of
challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or
something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to
brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang,
when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the
perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (_By the
Fireside_)--

"Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!"

Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts
of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul
itself. The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords
of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very
genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs
than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative
selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the
lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his
types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights
of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the
marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue,
angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's beasts:--

"Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight;"

or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in _The Glove_ or the
bright aethereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's
head, with its

"membraned wings
So wonderful, so wide,
So sun-suffused;"[120]

or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. "I always love
those wild creatures God sets up for themselves," he wrote to Miss
Barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy
minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." [121]

[Footnote 119: _Donald_.]

[Footnote 120: Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke's excellent
chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature.]

[Footnote 121: _To E.B.B._, 5th Jan. 1846.]

Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of
lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent. To
bear the mark of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or
built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to
acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning's imagination hardly
found in any other poet in the same degree. The "artificial products" of
civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of
poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with
images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always
reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are
better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect"
added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it
added for Wordsworth. His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers
or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and
sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses,
ships, shops. Most of these appealed also to other instincts,--to his
joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent
emotion. But their "artificiality" was an added attraction. The wedge,
for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending
thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his
muscle. The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of
the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing
at the festal board. His delight in complex technicalities, in the
tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of
Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in
mere intricacy as such. His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved
not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic
turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves
to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist
Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous
achievements of art. If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the
sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible
mace; the morning sun pours into Pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl;
and Fifine's ear is

"cut
Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[122]

[Footnote 122: _Fifine at the Fair_, ii. 325.]

Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called

"a rude
Armour ... hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it."[123]

[Footnote 123: _Sordello_, i. 135.]

And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of
a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded _Wahrheit_ and
_Dichtung_ of his greatest poem.

Between _Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_ there was, indeed, in Browning's mind,
a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a
factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached
from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his
poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to
his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions
of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a
speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well
disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of
principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition
nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by
which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker
slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the
fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts
an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his
interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest
currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which
in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have
to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated
thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep
waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides.

CHAPTER X.

THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE.

His voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as a
race we like best; ... the fascination of faith, the acceptance of
life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges,
the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of
action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion.

--HENRY JAMES.

I.

The trend of speculative thought in Europe during the century which
preceded the emergence of Browning may be described as a progressive
integration along several distinct lines of the great regions of
existence which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous medievalism,
thrust apart. Nature was brought into nearer relation with Man, and Man
with God, and God with Nature and with Man. In one aspect, not the least
striking, it was a "return to Nature"; economists from Adam Smith to
Malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world;
poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a life
"according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to
Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society
conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all
that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the
organism.

In another aspect it was a return to God. If the scientific movement
tended to subjugate man to a Nature in which, as Laplace said, there was
no occasion for God, Wordsworth saw both in Nature and in man a spirit
"deeply interfused"; and the great contemporary school of German
philosophy set all ethical thinking in a new perspective by its original
handling of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will of
God.

But, in yet another aspect, it was a return to Man. If Man was brought
nearer to Nature and to God, it was to a Nature and to a God which had
themselves acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. He
divined, with Wordsworth, his own joy, with Shelley his own love, in the
breathing flower; he saw with Hegel in the Absolute Spirit a power
vitally present in all man's secular activities and pursuits. And these
interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but the signs of less
articulate sensibilities far more widely diffused, which were in effect
bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental,
and emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron and Goethe, in
their different ways, the Hellenic past, a living element of the
present; and Fichte, calling upon his countrymen to emancipate
themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of
the German people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national
life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual
member, not an aggregate of other units competing with or controlling
him.

In this complicated movement Browning played a very notable and
memorable part. But it was one of which the first generation of his
readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and
which his own language often disguises or conceals. Of all the poets of
the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working
of God in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and
destiny of man. Half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless
variety of iteration, the nearness of God, to unravel the tangled
circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed
amid the intricacies of the finite.

On the side of Nature his interest was less keen and his vision less
subtle. His "visitations of the living God" came to him by other avenues
than those opened by Wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, "in love and holy
passion," upon outward beauty. Only limited classes of natural phenomena
appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and
catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with
foreboding and suspense. For continuities, both of the mechanical and
the organic kind, he lacked sense. We have seen how his eye fastened
everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron
uniformity or harmonious evolution. The abrupt demarcations which he
everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive
ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a
God-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome.

II.

His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an
all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and
acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God,
Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile
antagonists or antitheses. That their opposition is not ultimate, that
evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing
mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on
one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which
it could not securely rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he
vindicated the "infinity" of God and the soul by banishing all the
"finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. The infinite soul,
imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and
dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] "which
ever proving false still promise to be true," until death opens the
prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil
were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being;
and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the
dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's
earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of
progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence.

[Footnote 124: _Fifine at the Fair._]

But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning's mental make
which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by
theological prepossessions, in check. His most intense consciousness,
his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the
collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of
the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its
ground. This "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest
existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for
"intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood;
Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate
will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a
new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable
existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced
that "Time was done, Eternity begun."

Body and Time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved
into illusion. His actual pictures of departed souls suggest a state
very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust
upon Matter and distended in Time, to the timeless Infinitude it had
forgone. It does not escape from Time, but only passes on from the
limited section of Time known as life, into another section, without
limit, known as Eternity. And if it escapes from Body, at least Browning
represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a
garb of flesh. Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in another world, will find
her unknown lover's leaf in her hand, and "remember, and understand."

And just as Matter and Time invade Browning's spiritual eternity, so his
ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions
casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release. Two conceptions,
in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of
his thought, contend in Browning's mind. Now it is a state of
emancipation from earthly limits,--when the "broken arcs" become
"perfect rounds" and "evil" is transformed into "so much good more," and
"reward and repose" succeed the "struggles"[125] by which they have been
won. But at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a
sudden transformation but a continuation of the slow educative process
of earth in a succession of preliminary heavens before the consummate
state is reached. "Progress," in short, was too deeply ingrained in
Browning's conception of what was ultimately good, and therefore
ultimately real, not to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by
some casual backdoor of involuntary intuition. Even in that more
gracious state "achievement lacked a gracious somewhat"[126] to his
indomitable fighting instinct.

[Footnote 125: _Saul_, xvii.]

[Footnote 126: _One Word More_.]

"Soul resteth not, and mine must still advance,"

he had said in _Pauline_, and the soul that ceased to advance ceased for
Browning, in his most habitual mood, to exist. The "infinity" of the
soul was not so much a gift as a destiny, a power of hungering for ever
after an ideal completeness which it was indefinitely to pursue and to
approach, but not to reach. Far from having to await a remote
emancipation to become completely itself, the soul's supremest life was
in its hours of heroic stress, when it kept some dragon of unbelief
quiet underfoot, like Michael,

"Who stands calm, just because he feels it writhe."

It was at this point that the athletic energy of Browning's nature told
most palpably upon the complexion of his thought. It did not affect its
substance, but it altered the bearing of the parts, giving added weight
to all its mundane and positive elements. It gave value to every
challenging obstruction akin to that which allured him to every angular
and broken surface, to all the "evil" which balks our easy perception of
"good."[127] Above all, by idealising effort, it created a new ethical
end which every strenuous spirit could not merely strive after but
fulfil, every day of its mortal life; and thus virtually transferred the
focus of interest and importance from "the next world's reward and
repose" to the vital "struggles in this."

[Footnote 127: _Bishop Blougram_.]

Browning's characteristic conception of the nature and destiny of man
was thus not a compact and consistent system, but a group of intuitions
nourished from widely different regions of soul and sense, and
undergoing, like the face of a great actor, striking changes of
expression without material change of feature under the changing
incidence of stress and glow. The ultimate gist of his teaching was
presented through the medium of conceptions proper to another school of
thought, which, like a cryptogram, convey one meaning but express
another, He had to work with categories like finite and infinite, which
the atomic habits of his mind thrust into exclusive opposition; whereas
the profoundest thing that he had to say was that the "infinite" has to
be achieved in and through the finite, that just the most definitely
outlined action, the most individual purpose, the most sharply
expressive thought, the most intense and personal passion, are the
points or saliency in life which most surely catch the radiance of
eternity they break. The white light was "blank" until shattered by
refraction; and Browning is less Browning when he glories in its
unbroken purity than when he rejoices in the prism, whose obstruction
alone

"shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white."[128]

[Footnote 128: _Deaf and Dumb_.]

We have now to watch Browning's efforts to interpret this profound and
intimate persuasion of his in terms of the various conceptions at his
disposal.[129]

[Footnote 129: On the matter of this section cf. Mr A.C. Pigou's acute
and lucid discussions, _Browning as a Religious Teacher_, ch. viii. and
ix.]

III.

Beside the soul, there was something else that "stood sure" for
Browning--namely, God. Here, too, a theological dogma, steeped in his
ardent mind, acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a more
vital nexus with man and nature than any other poet of the century had
given it. And here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of
Browning's genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in
that wonderful Browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be
itself a universe "needing but a look to burst into immense life," and
infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door. The whole of his
theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely
found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the
universe and the individuality of man.

The mechanical Creator of Paley and the deists could never have
satisfied him. From the first he "saw God everywhere." There was in him
the stuff of which the "God-intoxicated" men are made, and he had
moments, like that expressed in one of his most deliberate and emphatic
personal utterances, in which all existence seemed to be the visible
Face of God--

"Become my universe that feels and knows."[130]

[Footnote 130: _Epilogue_.]

He clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic imaginings of the
great poets of the previous generation,--Wordsworth's "Something far
more deeply interfused," Shelley's "One spirit's plastic stress," and
Goethe's _Erdgeist_, who weaves the eternal vesture of God at the loom
of Time. The dying vision of Paracelsus is as sublime as these, and
marks Browning's nearest point of approach to the ways of thought they
embody. In all the vitalities of the world, from the uncouth play of the
volcano to the heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, God was
present, sharing their joy. But even here the psychological barrier is
apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning
broke in vain. This God of manifold joys was sharply detached from his
universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading
spirit. In every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers
which even the infinite God could not pass, and no poet less needed the
stern warning which he addressed to German speculation against the
"gigantic stumble"[131] of making them one. The mystic's dream of
seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising
itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of
mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual
and indivisible self. In later life the sharp lines which he drew from
the first about individual personality became a ring-fence within which
each man "cultivated his plot,"[132] managing independently as he might
the business of his soul. The divine love might wind inextricably about
him,[133] the dance of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding
impress its rhythms upon his life,[134] he retained his human identity
inviolate, a "point of central rock" amid the welter of the waves.[135]
His love might be a "spark from God's fire," but it was his own, to use
as he would; he "stood on his own stock of love and power."[136]

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