Robert Browning by C. H. Herford

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"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
anaemia of this anaemic 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.]

CHAPTER IV.

WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. _MEN AND WOMEN_.

This foot, once planted on the goal;
This glory-garland round my soul.
--_The Last Ride Together_.

Warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze
Of Alpine highths thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
--LANDOR.

I.

The _Bells and Pomegranates_ made no very great way with the public,
which found the matter unequal and the title obscure. But both the title
and the greater part of the single poems are linked inseparably with the
most intimate personal relationship of his life. Hardly one of the
Romances, as we saw, but had been read in MS. by Elizabeth Barrett, and
pronounced upon with the frank yet critical delight of her nature. In
the abstruse symbolic title, too,--implying, as Browning expected his
readers to discover, "sound and sense" or "music and discoursing,"--her
wit had divined a more felicitous application to Browning's poetry--

"Some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."

The two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had
for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[25]
and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was
finally to draw them together. A few years later, a basket of
pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in
France, and she laughingly accepted the omen. The omen was fulfilled;
Elizabeth Browning's poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of
that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that
Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of
his glorious woman-poet, Balaustion.

[Footnote 25: She had at once discerned the "new voice" in _Paracelsus_,
1835; and the occasion may have been not much later ("years ago" in
1845) on which he was all but admitted to the "shrine" of the "world's
wonder" _(R.B. to E.B.B._, Jan. 10, 1845).]

But she, on her part, also brought a new and potent influence to bear
upon his poetry, the only one which after early manhood he ever
experienced; and their union was by far the most signal event in
Browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life. Her experience
up to the time when they met had been in most points singularly unlike
his own. Though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less
of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a
passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of English wood
and meadow was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an enchanted
memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened London
chamber. "Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she
said to Horne, "have passed in my thoughts." Both were eager students,
and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being
"learned poets"; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly,
like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the
world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his
knowledge of men; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew chiefly served
to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths
crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods
and Titans, angels and seraphim. Then, notwithstanding the _role_ of
hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching
conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive
vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own; only that the energy which
in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own
opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling
violence,--sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and
sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of
collocation. Both poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries
by a certain exuberance--"a fine excess"--quite foreign to the instincts
of a generation which repudiated the Revolution and did its best to
repudiate Byron. But Browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on
occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [26] intense,
and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an
intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and
alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams
across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with
conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange
loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said
everything he thought; of her the truer formula would be her own, that
she "took every means of saying" what she thought.[27] There was
something of AEschylus in her, as there was much of Aristophanes in him;
it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself
upon the task of rendering the _Prometheus Bound_ in English; they met
on common ground in the human and pathetic Euripides. But her power was
lyric, not dramatic. She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and
passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was
personating some imaginary mind.

[Footnote 26: The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but
could not pronounce it. He said she was _testa lunga (Letters of R. and
E.B., i. 7)_.]

[Footnote 27: _Letters, R. and E. B._, i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to
Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say
a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or
unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad
policy as well as bad art" (_Letters of E. B. B._, ii., 200).]

Early in January 1845 the two poets were brought by the genial Kenyon,
her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the
memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in English
literature, at once began. Browning, as his way was in telling other
men's stories, burst at once _in medias res_ in this great story of his
own. "I love your verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart," he
assures her in the first sentence of his first letter. He feels them
already too much a part of himself to ever "try and find
fault,"--"nothing comes of it all,--so into me has it gone and part of
me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of
which but took root and grew." It was "living," like his own; it was
also direct, as his own was not. His frank _cameraderie_ was touched
from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by
no means prone. "You _do_, what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only
seem likely now to do for the first time. You speak out, _you_,--I only
make men and women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and
fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, _but I am going to
try_." Thus the first contact with the "Lyric Love" of after days set
vibrating the chords of all that was lyric and personal in Browning's
nature. His brilliant virtuosity in the personation of other minds
threatened to check all simple utterance of his own. The "First Poem" of
Robert Browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as he had broken
from his "dancing ring of men and women,"--the Dramatic Lyrics and
Romances and one or two outstanding dramas,--he meant to write it. Miss
Barrett herself hardly understood until much later the effect that her
personality, the very soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her
correspondent. She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and not
least in rollicking pieces, like _Sibrandus_ or _The Spanish Cloister_,
which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly
fragile woman is too rarely credited. _Pippa Passes_ she could find in
her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other
works--a preference in which he agreed. Few more brilliant appreciations
of English poetry are extant than some of those which sped during 1845
and 1846 from the invalid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room"
looking out on the garden at New Cross. But she did not conceal from him
that she wished him to seek "the other crown" also. "I do not think,
with all that music in you, only your own personality should be
dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the
dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she
regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic
scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. And
it is clear that before the last plays, _Luria_ and _A Soul's Tragedy_,
were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. It was not
altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious)
when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually
becoming adjusted, "_seeing all things, as it does, in you._"

[Footnote 28: _E.B.B to R.B._, 26th May 1846. Cf. _R.B._, 13th Feb.
1846.]

She, on her part, united, as clever women in love so often do, with a
woman's more utter self-abasement a larger measure of critical
penetration. The "poor tired wandering singer," who so humbly took the
hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with perfect sincerity
applied to herself his unconscious phrase--

"Cloth of frieze, be not too bold
Though thou'rt match'd with cloth of gold,"

"That, beloved, was written for me!"[29]--shows at the same time the
keenest insight into the qualities of his work. She felt in him the
masculine temper and the masculine range, his singular union of rough
and even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating music. With
the world of society and affairs she had other channels of
communication. But no one of her other friends--not _Orion_ Horne, not
even Kenyon--bridged as Browning did the gulf between the world of
society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of
poetry in which she lived. If she quickened the need for lyrical
utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer
contact with common things. If she had her part in _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_, he had his, no less, in _Aurora Leigh_.

[Footnote 29: _E.B.B. to R.B._, 9th Jan. 1846.]

Twenty-one months passed between Browning's first letter and their
marriage. The tentative exchange of letters passed into a formal
"contract" to correspond,--sudden if not as "unadvised" as the love-vows
of Juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, and she, with the security
of the whole-hearted, boldly recalled. All the winter and early spring
her health forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet
pressure of his will they never would have met. But with May came
renewed vigour, and she reluctantly consented to a visit. "He has a way
of putting things which I have not, a way of putting aside,--so he
came." A few weeks later he spoke. She at first absolutely refused to
entertain the thought; he believed, and was silent. But in the meantime
the letters and the visits "rained down more and more," and the fire
glowed under the surface of the writing and the talk, subdued but
unsuppressed. Once more his power of "putting aside" compelled her to
listen, and when she listened she found herself assailed at a point
which her own exalted spirituality made her least able to defend, by a
love more utterly self-sacrificing than even she had ever imagined. This
man of the masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in any
case have finally "put aside" all obstacles to her consent. But when he
disclosed--to her amazement, well as she thought she knew him--that he
had asked the right to love her without claiming any love in return,
that when he first spoke he had believed her disease to be incurable,
and yet preferred to be allowed to sit only a day at her side to the
fulfilment of "the brightest dream which should exclude her," her
resistance gave way,--and little by little, in her own beautiful words,
she was drawn into the persuasion that something was left, and that she
could still do something for the happiness of another. In another sense
than she intended in the great opening sonnet "from the Portuguese,"
Love, undreamt of, had come to her with the irresistible might of Death,
and called her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing,
almost extinguished, desire to live. Is it hyperbole, to be reminded of
that other world-famous rescue from death which Browning, twenty-five
years later, was to tell with such infinite verve? Browning did not need
to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent and audacious vitality
of his Herakles; he had brought back his own "espoused saint," like
Alcestis, from the grave.

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