Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

Macready was pleased with the idea, and hopeful that his friend would be more successful with the English statesman than with the eunuch Narses.

  A few months elapsed before the poet, who had set aside the long work upon which he was engaged (“Sordello”), called upon Macready with the manuscript of “Strafford”. The latter hoped much from it. In March the MS. was ready. About the end of the month Macready took it to Covent Garden Theatre, and read it to Mr. Osbaldiston, “who caught at it with avidity, and agreed to produce it without delay.”

  It was an eventful first of May — an eventful twelvemonth, indeed, for it was the initial year of the Victorian era, notable, too, as that wherein the Electric Telegraph was established, and, in letters, wherein a new dramatic literature had its origin. For “Strafford”, already significant of a novel movement, and destined, it seems to me, to be still more significant in that great dramatic period towards which we are fast converging, was not less important to the Drama in England, as a new departure in method and radically indicative of a fresh standpoint, than “Hernani” was in France. But in literary history the day itself is doubly memorable, for in the forenoon Carlyle gave the first of his lectures in London. The play was a success, despite the shamefully inadequate acting of some of those entrusted with important parts. There was once, perhaps there were more occasions than one, where success poised like the soul of a Mohammedan on the invisible thread leading to Paradise, but on either side of which lies perdition. There was none to cry `Timbul’ save Macready, except Miss Helen Faucit, who gained a brilliant triumph as Lady Carlisle. The part of Charles I. was enacted so execrably that damnation for all was again and again within measurable distance. “The Younger Vane” ranted so that a hiss, like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house. There was not even any extraneous aid to a fortunate impression. The house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the “scenery” commonplace and sometimes noticeably inappropriate, the costumes and accessories almost sordid. But in the face of all this, a triumph was secured. For a brief while Macready believed that the star of regeneration had arisen. Unfortunately ‘twas, in the words of a contemporary dramatic poet, “a rising sorrow splendidly forlorn.” The financial condition of Covent Garden Theatre was so ruinous that not even the most successful play could have restored its doomed fortunes.

  After the fifth night one of the leading actors, having received a better offer elsewhere, suddenly withdrew.

  This was the last straw. A collapse forthwith occurred. In the scramble for shares in the few remaining funds every one gained something, except the author, who was to have received 12 Pounds for each performance for the first twenty-five nights, and 10 Pounds each for ten nights further. This disaster was a deep disappointment to Browning, and a by no means transitory one, for three or four years later he wrote (Advt. of “Bells and Pomegranates”): “Two or three years ago I wrote a play, about which the chief matter I much care to recollect at present is, that a pitful of good-natured people applauded it. Ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention.” But, except in so far as its abrupt declension from the stage hurt its author in the eyes of the critics, and possibly in those of theatrical managers, “Strafford” was certainly no failure. It has the elements of a great acting play. Everything, even the language (and here was a stumbling-block with most of the critics and criticasters), was subordinated to dramatic exigencies: though the subordination was in conformity with a novel shaping method. “Strafford” was not, however, allowed to remain unknown to those who had been unable to visit Covent Garden Theatre.* Browning’s name had quite sufficient literary repute to justify a publisher in risking the issue of a drama by him, one, at any rate, that had the advantage of association with Macready’s name. The Longmans issued it, and the author had the pleasure of knowing that his third poetic work was not produced at the expense of a relative, but at that of the publishers. It had but an indifferent reception, however.

  —

  * “It is time to deny a statement that has been repeated ad nauseam

  in every notice that professes to give an account of Mr. Browning’s career.

  Whatever is said or not said, it is always that his plays have `failed’

  on the stage. In point of fact, the three plays which he has brought out

  have all succeeded, and have owed it to fortuitous circumstances

  that their tenure on the boards has been comparatively short.”

  — E. W. Gosse, in article in `The Century Magazine’.

  —

  Most people who saw the performance of “Strafford” given in 1886, under the auspices of the Browning Society, were surprised as well as impressed: for few, apparently, had realised from perusal the power of the play as made manifest when acted. The secret of this is that the drama, when privily read, seems hard if not heavy in its diction, and to be so inornate, though by no means correspondingly simple, as to render any comparison between it and the dramatic work of Shakespeare out of the question. But when acted, the artistry of the play is revealed. Its intense naturalness is due in great part to the stern concision of the lines, where no word is wasted, where every sentence is fraught with the utmost it can convey. The outlines which disturbed us by their vagueness become more clear: in a word, we all see in enactment what only a few of us can discern in perusal. The play has its faults, but scarcely those of language, where the diction is noble and rhythmic, because it is, so to speak, the genuine rind of the fruit it envelops. But there are dramatic faults — primarily, in the extreme economy of the author in the presentment of his `dramatis personae’, who are embodied abstractions — monomaniacs of ideas, as some one has said of Hugo’s personages — rather than men as we are, with manifold complexities in endless friction or fusion. One cardinal fault is the lack of humour, which to my mind is the paramount objection to its popular acceptance. Another, is the misproportionate length of some of the speeches. Once again, there is, as in the greater portion of Browning’s longer poems and dramas, a baneful equality of emphasis. The conception of Charles I. is not only obviously weak, but strangely prejudiced adversely for so keen an analyst of the soul as Browning. For what a fellow-dramatist calls this “Sunset Shadow of a King”, no man or woman could abase every hope and energy. Shakespeare would never have committed the crucial mistake of making Charles the despicable deformity he is in Browning’s drama. Strafford himself disappears too soon: in the fourth act there is the vacuum abhorred of dramatic propriety.

  When he again comes on the scene, the charm is partly broken. But withal the play is one of remarkable vigour and beauty. It seems to me that too much has been written against it on the score of its metrical rudeness. The lines are beat out by a hammer, but in the process they are wrought clear of all needless alloy. To urge, as has been lately urged, that it lacks all human touch and is a mere intellectual fanfaronade, and that there is not once a line of poignant insight, is altogether uncritical. Readers of this mind must have forgotten or be indifferent to those lines, for example, where the wretched Charles stammeringly excuses himself to his loyal minister for his death-warrant, crying out that it was wrung from him, and begging Strafford not to curse him: or, again, that wonderfully significant line, so full of a too tardy knowledge and of concentrated scorn, where Strafford first begs the king to “be good to his children,” and then, with a contempt that is almost sublime, implores, “Stay, sir, do not promise, do not swear!” The whole of the second scene in the fifth act is pure genius. The reader, or spectator, knows by this time that all hope is over: that Strafford, though all unaware, is betrayed and undone. It is a subtle dramatic ruse, that of Browning’s representing him sitting in his apartment in the Tower with his young children, William and Anne, blithely singing.

  Can one read and ever forget the lines giving the gay Italian rhyme, with the boy’s picturesquely childish prose-accompaniment? Strafford is seated, weary and distraught: —

  ”`O bel
l’ andare

  Per barca in mare,

  Verso la sera

  Di Primavera!’

  William. The boat’s in the broad moonlight all this while —

  `Verso la sera

  Di Primavera!’

  And the boat shoots from underneath the moon

  Into the shadowy distance; only still

  You hear the dipping oar —

  `Verso la sera,’

  And faint, and fainter, and then all’s quite gone,

  Music and light and all, like a lost star.

  Anne. But you should sleep, father: you were to sleep.

  Strafford. I do sleep, Anne; or if not — you must know

  There’s such a thing as . . .

  William. You’re too tired to sleep.

  Strafford. It will come by-and-by and all day long,

  In that old quiet house I told you of:

  We sleep safe there.

  Anne. Why not in Ireland?

  Strafford. No!

  Too many dreams! — ”

  To me this children’s-song and the fleeting and now plaintive echo of it, as “Voices from Within” — “Verso la sera, Di Primavera” — in the terrible scene where Strafford learns his doom, is only to be paralleled by the song of Mariana in “Measure for Measure”, wherein, likewise, is abduced in one thrilling poignant strain the quintessential part of the tense life of the whole play.

  So much has been written concerning the dramas of Robert Browning — though indeed there is still room for a volume of careful criticism, dealing solely with this theme — that I have the less regret in having so inadequately to pass in review works of such poetic magnitude as those enumerated above.

  But it would be impossible, in so small a book as this, to examine them in detail without incurring a just charge of misproportion. The greatness and the shortcomings of the dramas and dramatic poems must be noted as succinctly as practicable; and I have dwelt more liberally upon “Pauline”, “Paracelsus”, and “Strafford”, partly because (certainly without more than one exception, “Sordello”) these are the three least read of Browning’s poems, partly because they indicate the sweep and reach of his first orient eagle-flight through new morning-skies, and mainly because in them we already find Browning at his best and at his weakest, because in them we hear not only the rush of his sunlit pinions, but also the low earthward surge of dullard wings.

  Browning is foreshadowed in his earliest writings, as perhaps no other poet has been to like extent. In the “Venus and Adonis”, and the “Rape of Lucrece”, we have but the dimmest foreview of the author of “Hamlet”, “Othello”, and “Macbeth”; had Shakespeare died prematurely none could have predicted, from the exquisite blossoms of his adolescence, the immortal fruit of his maturity. But, in Browning’s three earliest works, we clearly discern him, as the sculptor of Melos previsioned his Venus in the rough-hewn block.

  Thenceforth, to change the imagery, he developed rapidly upon the same lines, or doubled upon himself in intricate revolutions; but already his line of life, his poetic parallel, was definitely established.

  In the consideration of Browning’s dramas it is needful to be sure of one’s vantage for judgment. The first step towards this assurance is the ablation of the chronic Shakespearian comparison. Primarily, the shaping spirit of the time wrought Shakespeare and Browning to radically divergent methods of expression, but each to a method in profound harmony with the dominant sentiment of the age in which he lived. Above all others, the Elizabethan era was rich in romantic adventure, of the mind as well as of the body, and above all others, save that of the Renaissance in Italy, animated by a passionate curiosity. So, too, supremely, the Victorian era has been prolific of novel and vast Titanic struggles of the human spirit to reach those Gates of Truth whose lowest steps are the scarce discernible stars and furthest suns we scan, by piling Ossas of searching speculation upon Pelions of hardly-won positive knowledge. The highest exemplar of the former is Shakespeare, Browning the profoundest interpreter of the latter. To achieve supremacy the one had to create a throbbing actuality, a world of keenest living, of acts and intervolved situations and episodes: the other to fashion a mentality so passionately alive that its manifold phases should have all the reality of concrete individualities. The one reveals individual life to us by the play of circumstance, the interaction of events, the correlative eduction of personal characteristics: the other by his apprehension of that quintessential movement or mood or phase wherein the soul is transitorily visible on its lonely pinnacle of light. The elder poet reveals life to us by the sheer vividness of his own vision: the younger, by a newer, a less picturesque but more scientific abduction, compels the complex rayings of each soul-star to a singular simplicity, as by the spectrum analysis. The one, again, fulfils his aim by a broad synthesis based upon the vivid observance and selection of vital details: the other by an extraordinary acute psychic analysis. In a word, Shakespeare works as with the clay of human action: Browning as with the clay of human thought.

  As for the difference in value of the two methods it is useless to dogmatise. The psychic portraiture produced by either is valuable only so far as it is convincingly true.

  The profoundest insight cannot reach deeper than its own possibilities of depth. The physiognomy of the soul is never visible in its entirety, barely ever even its profile. The utmost we can expect to reproduce, perhaps even to perceive in the most quintessential moment, is a partially faithful, partially deceptive silhouette. As no human being has ever seen his or her own soul, in all its rounded completeness of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of what is temporal and perishable and what is germinal and essential, how can we expect even the subtlest analyst to adequately depict other souls than his own. It is Browning’s high distinction that he has this soul-depictive faculty — restricted as even in his instance it perforce is — to an extent unsurpassed by any other poet, ancient or modern. As a sympathetic critic has remarked, “His stage is not the visible phenomenal England (or elsewhere) of history; it is a point in the spiritual universe, where naked souls meet and wrestle, as they play the great game of life, for counters, the true value of which can only be realised in the bullion of a higher life than this.” No doubt there is “a certain crudeness in the manner in which these naked souls are presented,” not only in “Strafford” but elsewhere in the plays. Browning markedly has the defects of his qualities.

  As part of his method, it should be noted that his real trust is upon monologue rather than upon dialogue. To one who works from within outward — in contradistinction to the Shakespearian method of striving to win from outward forms “the passion and the life whose fountains are within” — the propriety of this dramatic means can scarce be gainsaid. The swift complicated mental machinery can thus be exhibited infinitely more coherently and comprehensibly than by the most electric succinct dialogue. Again and again Browning has nigh foundered in the morass of monologue, but, broadly speaking, he transcends in this dramatic method.

  At the same time, none must take it for granted that the author of “A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon”, “Luria”, “In a Balcony”, is not dramatic in even the most conventional sense. Above all, indeed — as Mr. Walter Pater has said — his is the poetry of situations. In each of the `dramatis personae’, one of the leading characteristics is loyalty to a dominant ideal. In Strafford’s case it is that of unswerving devotion to the King: in Mildred’s and in Thorold’s, in “A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon”, it is that of subservience respectively to conventional morality and family pride (Lord Tresham, it may be added, is the most hopelessly monomaniacal of all Browning’s “monomaniacs”): in Valence’s, in “Colombe’s Birthday”, to chivalric love: in Charles, in “King Victor and King Charles”, to kingly and filial duty: in Anael’s and Djabal’s, in “The Return of the Druses”, respectively to religion and unscrupulous ambition modified by patriotism: in Chiappino’s, in “A Soul’s Tragedy”, to purely sordid ambition: in Luria’s, to noble steadf
astness: and in Constance’s, in “In a Balcony”, to self-denial. Of these plays, “The Return of the Druses” seems to me the most picturesque, “Luria” the most noble and dignified, and “In a Balcony” the most potentially a great dramatic success. The last is in a sense a fragment, but, though the integer of a great unaccomplished drama, is as complete in itself as the Funeral March in Beethoven’s `Eroica’ Symphony. “A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon” has the radical fault characteristic of writers of sensational fiction, a too promiscuous “clearing the ground” by syncope and suicide. Another is the juvenility of Mildred: — a serious infraction of dramatic law, where the mere tampering with history, as in the circumstances of King Victor’s death in the earlier play, is at least excusable by high precedent. More disastrous, poetically, is the ruinous banality of Mildred’s anticlimax when, after her brother reveals himself as her lover’s murderer, she, like the typical young `Miss Anglaise’ of certain French novelists, betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclaiming, in effect, “What, you’ve murdered my lover! Well, tell me all. Pardon? Oh, well, I pardon you: at least I THINK I do. Thorold, my dear brother, how very wretched you must be!”

  I am unaware if this anticlimax has been pointed out by any one, but surely it is one of the most appalling lapses of genius which could be indicated. Even the beautiful song in the third scene of the first act, “There’s a woman like a dew-drop, she’s so purer than the purest,” is, in the circumstances, nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous. No wonder that, on the night the play was first acted, Mertoun’s song, as he clambered to his mistress’s window, caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory. It is with diffidence I take so radically distinct a standpoint from that of Dickens, who declared he knew no love like that of Mildred and Mertoun, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he would rather have written this play than any work of modern times: nor with less reluctance, that I find myself at variance with Mr. Skelton, who speaks of the drama as “one of the most perfectly conceived and perfectly executed tragedies in the language.” In the instance of Luria, that second Othello, suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act of absolution: the death of Anael seems as inevitable as the flash of lightning after the concussion of thunder-clouds. But Thorold’s suicide is mere weakness, scarce a perverted courage; and Mildred’s broken heart was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician. “Colombe’s Birthday” has a certain remoteness of interest, really due to the reader’s more or less acute perception of the radical divergence, for all Valence’s greatness of mind and spirit, between the fair young Duchess and her chosen lover: a circumstance which must surely stand in the way of its popularity. Though “A Soul’s Tragedy” has the saving quality of humour, it is of too grim a kind to be provocative of laughter.