Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  ”Is it so you said

  A plait of hair should wave across my neck?

  No — this way.”

  Who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers’ “crowning night”?

  ”Ottima. The day of it too, Sebald!

  When heaven’s pillars seemed o’erbowed with heat,

  Its black-blue canopy suffered descend

  Close on us both, to weigh down each to each,

  And smother up all life except our life.

  So lay we till the storm came.

  Sebald. How it came!

  Ottima. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;

  Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;

  And ever and anon some bright white shaft

  Burned thro’ the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,

  As if God’s messenger thro’ the close wood screen

  Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,

  Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke

  The thunder like a whole sea overhead — — ”

  Surely there is nothing in all our literature more poignantly dramatic than this first part of “Pippa Passes”. The strains which Pippa sings here and throughout are as pathetically fresh and free as a thrush’s song in the heart of a beleaguered city, and as with the same unconsidered magic. There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling tones, caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in

  ”Give her but a least excuse to love me!

  When — where — — ”

  No one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion, has a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness, behind which is the narrow twilit backward way.

  ”Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow;

  Crown me your queen, your spirit’s arbitress,

  Magnificent in sin. Say that!

  Sebald. I crown you

  My great white queen, my spirit’s arbitress,

  Magnificent . . .

  [From without is heard the voice of PIPPA singing — ]

  The year’s at the spring,

  And day’s at the morn;

  Morning’s at seven;

  The hill-side’s dew-pearled;

  The lark’s on the wing;

  The snail’s on the thorn:

  God’s in his heaven —

  All’s right with the world!

  [PIPPA passes.]

  Sebald. God’s in his heaven! Do you hear that?

  Who spoke?”

  This sweet voice of Pippa reaches the guilty lovers, reaches Luigi in his tower, hesitating between love and patriotic duty, reaches Jules and Phene when all the happiness of their unborn years trembles in the balance, reaches the Prince of the Church just when his conscience is sore beset by a seductive temptation, reaches one and all at a crucial moment in the life of each. The ethical lesson of the whole poem is summed up in

  ”All service ranks the same with God —

  With God, whose puppets, best and worst,

  Are we: there is no last nor first,”

  and in

  ”God’s in his heaven —

  All’s right with the world!”

  “With God there is no lust of Godhood,” says Rossetti in “Hand and Soul”: `Und so ist der blaue Himmel grosser als jedes Gewoelk darin, und dauerhafter dazu,’ meditates Jean Paul: “There can be nothing good, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient,” utters the Oriental mystic.

  It is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were indirectly due to the poet’s solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and “dewy eve”, in the wooded districts south of Dulwich, at Hatcham, and upon Wimbledon Common, whither he was often wont to wander and to ramble for hours, and where he composed one day the well-known lines upon Shelley, with many another unrecorded impulse of song. Here, too, it was, that Carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by `a beautiful youth’, who introduced himself as one of the philosopher’s profoundest admirers.

  It was from the Dulwich wood that, one afternoon in March, he saw a storm glorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty; a memorable vision, recorded in an utterance of Luigi to his mother: here too that, in autumnal dusks, he saw many a crescent moon with “notched and burning rim.” He never forgot the bygone “sunsets and great stars” he saw in those days of his fervid youth. Browning remarked once that the romance of his life was in his own soul; and on another occasion I heard him smilingly add, to some one’s vague assertion that in Italy only was there any romance left, “Ah, well, I should like to include poor old Camberwell!” Perhaps he was thinking of his lines in “Pippa Passes”, of the days when that masterpiece came ebullient from the fount of his genius —

  ”May’s warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights —

  Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!”

  There is all the distinction between “Pippa Passes” and “Sordello” that there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx. The latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the `symmetria prisca’ of ideal sculpture. I have already alluded to “Sordello” as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry. This, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped “I should do it justice,” thereby meaning that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece. It is a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan. That the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable, also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound thoughts and a multitude of will-o’-the-wisp-like fancies which all shape towards high thinking.

  But it is monotonous as one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight. The fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness, has, coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, been Browning’s ruin here.

  There is one charge even yet too frequently made against “Sordello”, that of “obscurity”. Its interest may be found remote, its treatment verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those unaccustomed to excursions from the familiar highways of old usage, but its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared with the “silva oscura” of the “Divina Commedia”.

  Surely this question of Browning’s obscurity was expelled to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo’s chariot, wrote his famous incidental passage in his “Essay on Chapman”.

  Too probably, in the dim disintegrating future which will reduce all our o’ertoppling extremes, “Sordello” will be as little read as “The Faerie Queene”, and, similarly, only for the gleam of the quenchless lamps amid its long deserted alleys and stately avenues. Sadly enough, for to poets it will always be an unforgotten land — a continent with amaranth-haunted Vales of Tempe, where, as Spenser says in one of the Aeclogues of “The Shepherd’s Calendar”, they will there oftentimes “sitten as drouned in dreme.”

  It has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own. I know of no other poem in the language which is at once so wearisome and so seductive. How can one explain paradoxes? There is a charm, or there is none: that is what it amounts to, for each individual. `Tutti ga i so gusti, e mi go i mii’ — “everybody follows his taste, and I follow mine,” as the Venetian saying, quoted by Browning at the head of his Rawdon Brown sonnet, has it.

  All that need be known concerning the framework of “Sordello”, and of the real Sordello himself, will be found in the various Browning hand-books, in Mr. Nettleship’s and other dissertations, and, particularly, in Mrs. Dall’s most circumspect and able historical essay. It is sufficient here to say that while the Sordello and Palma of the poet are traceable in the Cunizza and the strange comet-like Sordello
of the Italian and Provencal Chronicles (who has his secure immortality, by Dante set forth in leonine guise — `a guisa di leon quando si posa’ — in the “Purgatorio”), both these are the most shadowy of prototypes. The Sordello of Browning is a typical poetic soul: the narrative of the incidents in the development of this soul is adapted to the historical setting furnished by the aforesaid Chronicles. Sordello is a far more profound study than Aprile in “Paracelsus”, in whom, however, he is obviously foreshadowed. The radical flaw in his nature is that indicated by Goethe of Heine, that “he had no heart.” The poem is the narrative of his transcendent aspirations, and more or less futile accomplishment.

  It would be vain to attempt here any adequate excerption of lines of singular beauty. Readers familiar with the poem will recall passage after passage — among which there is probably none more widely known than the grandiose sunset lines: —

  ”That autumn eve was stilled:

  A last remains of sunset dimly burned

  O’er the far forests, — like a torch-flame turned

  By the wind back upon its bearer’s hand

  In one long flare of crimson; as a brand,

  The woods beneath lay black.” . . .

  What haunting lines there are, every here and there — such as those of Palma, with her golden hair like spilt sunbeams, or those on Elys, with her

  ”Few fine locks

  Coloured like honey oozed from topmost rocks

  Sun-blanched the livelong summer,” . . .

  or these,

  ”Day by day

  New pollen on the lily-petal grows,

  And still more labyrinthine buds the rose — — ”

  or, once more,

  ”A touch divine —

  And the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod;

  Visibly through his garden walketh God — — ”

  But, though sorely tempted, I must not quote further, save only the concluding lines of the unparalleled and impassioned address to Dante: —

  ”Dante, pacer of the shore

  Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,

  Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume,

  Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope

  Into a darkness quieted by hope;

  Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God’s eye

  In gracious twilights where his chosen lie — — ”

  . . . . .

  It is a fair land, for those who have lingered in its byways: but, alas, a troubled tide of strange metres, of desperate rhythms, of wild conjunctions, of panic-stricken collocations, oftentimes overwhelms it. “Sordello” grew under the poet’s fashioning till, like the magic vapour of the Arabian wizard, it passed beyond his control, “voluminously vast.”

  It is not the truest admirers of what is good in it who will refuse to smile at the miseries of conscientious but baffled readers. Who can fail to sympathise with Douglas Jerrold when, slowly convalescent from a serious illness, he found among some new books sent him by a friend a copy of “Sordello”. Thomas Powell, writing in 1849, has chronicled the episode. A few lines, he says, put Jerrold in a state of alarm. Sentence after sentence brought no consecutive thought to his brain. At last the idea occurred to him that in his illness his mental faculties had been wrecked. The perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head he sank back on the sofa, crying, “O God, I AM an idiot!” A little later, adds Powell, when Jerrold’s wife and sister entered, he thrust “Sordello” into their hands, demanding what they thought of it. He watched them intently while they read. When at last Mrs. Jerrold remarked, “I don’t understand what this man means; it is gibberish,” her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed, “Thank God, I am NOT an idiot!”

  Many friends of Browning will remember his recounting this incident almost in these very words, and his enjoyment therein: though he would never admit justification for such puzzlement.

  But more illustrious personages than Douglas Jerrold were puzzled by the poem. Lord Tennyson manfully tackled it, but he is reported to have admitted in bitterness of spirit: “There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, `Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,’ and `Who would has heard Sordello’s story told!’“ Carlyle was equally candid: “My wife,” he writes, “has read through `Sordello’ without being able to make out whether `Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”

  In an article on this poem, in a French magazine, M. Odysse Barot quotes a passage where the poet says “God gave man two faculties” — and adds, “I wish while He was about it (`pendant qu’il etait en train’) God had supplied another — viz., the power of understanding Mr. Browning.”

  And who does not remember the sad experience of generous and delightful Gilead P. Beck, in “The Golden Butterfly”: how, after “Fifine at the Fair”, frightful symptoms set in, till in despair he took up “Red Cotton Nightcap Country”, and fell for hours into a dull comatose misery. “His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning. And then he took all his volumes, and, disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them. `I wish,’ he said, `that I could put the poet there too.’“ One other anecdote of the kind was often, with evident humorous appreciation, recounted by the poet. On his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a “brother-poet”, he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. The great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as “enigmatic”. Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.

  That he was himself aware of the shortcomings of “Sordello” as a work of art is not disputable. In 1863, Mrs. Orr says, he considered the advisability of “rewriting it in a more transparent manner, but concluded that the labour would be disproportionate to the result, and contented himself with summarising the contents of each `book’ in a continuous heading, which represents the main thread of the story.”

  The essential manliness of Browning is evident in the famous dedication to the French critic Milsand, who was among his early admirers. “My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since.”

  Whatever be the fate of “Sordello”, one thing pertinent to it shall survive: the memorable sentence in the dedicatory preface — “My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.”

  The poem has disastrous faults, but is a magnificent failure. “Vast as night,” to borrow a simile from Victor Hugo, but, like night, innumerously starred.

  Chapter 6.

  “Pippa Passes”, “The Ring and the Book”, “The Inn Album”, these are Browning’s three great dramatic poems, as distinct from his poetic plays. All are dramas in the exact sense, though the three I have named are dramas for mental and not for positive presentation. Each reader must embody for himself the images projected on his brain by the electric quality of the poet’s genius: within the ken of his imagination he may perceive scenes not less moving, incidents not less thrilling, complexities of motive and action not less intricately involved, than upon the conventional stage.

  The first is a drama of an idea, the second of the immediate and remote consequences of a single act, the third of the tyranny of the passions.

  I understand the general opinion among lovers and earnest students of Browning’s poetry to be that the highest peaks of his genius tower from the vast tableland of “The Ring and the Book”; that thenceforth there was declension. But Browning is not to be measured by common estimates. It is easy to indicate, in the instances of many poets, just where the music reaches its sweetest, its noblest, just where the extreme glow wanes, just where the first shadows come leaping like greyhounds, or steal almo
st imperceptibly from slow-closing horizons.

  But with Browning, as with Shakespeare, as with Victor Hugo, it is difficult for our vision to penetrate the glow irradiating the supreme heights of accomplishment. Like Balzac, like Shakespeare again, he has revealed to us a territory so vast, that while we bow down before the sun westering athwart distant Andes, the gold of sunrise is already flashing behind us, upon the shoulder of Atlas.

  It is certain that “The Ring and the Book” is unique. Even Goethe’s masterpiece had its forerunners, as in Marlowe’s “Faustus”, and its ambitious offspring, as in Bailey’s “Festus”. But is it a work of art? Here is the only vital question which at present concerns us.

  It is altogether useless to urge, as so many admirers of Browning do, that “The Ring and the Book” is as full of beauties as the sea is of waves. Undeniably it is, having been written in the poet’s maturity. But, to keep to the simile, has this epical poem the unity of ocean? Does it consist of separate seas, or is it really one, as the wastes which wash from Arctic to Antarctic, through zones temperate and equatorial, are yet one and indivisible? If it have not this unity it is still a stupendous accomplishment, but it is not a work of art. And though art is but the handmaiden of genius, what student of Comparative Literature will deny that nothing has survived the ruining breath of Time — not any intellectual greatness nor any spiritual beauty, that is not clad in perfection, be it absolute or relative — for relative perfection there is, despite the apparent paradox.

  The mere bulk of “The Ring and the Book” is, in point of art, nothing. One day, after the publication of this poem, Carlyle hailed the author with enthusiastic praise in which lurked damning irony: “What a wonderful fellow you are, Browning: you have written a whole series of `books’ about what could be summed up in a newspaper paragraph!” Here, Carlyle was at once right and wrong. The theme, looked at dispassionately, is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity. But the poet looked upon the central incident as the inventive mechanician regards the tiny pivot remote amid the intricate maze of his machinery. Here, as elsewhere, Browning’s real subject is too often confounded with the accidents of the subject. His triumph is not that he has created so huge a literary monument, but rather that, notwithstanding its bulk, he has made it shapely and impressive. Stress has frequently been laid on the greatness of the achievement in the writing of twelve long poems in the exposition of one theme. Again, in point of art, what significance has this? None. There is no reason why it should not have been in nine or eleven parts; no reason why, having been demonstrated in twelve, it should not have been expanded through fifteen or twenty. Poetry ever looks askance at that gipsy-cousin of hers, “Tour-de-force”.