THE LAST DECADE.
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled.
Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy. In the autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself, and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson. Asolo, too, the town of Pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant feelings,—"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!" But the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception which had once been his. The mood described ten years later in the Prologue to Asolando was already dominant: [the] iris glow of youth no longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. But he built up no more great poems. He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. The Dramatic Idyls of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were at least premature. There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." Browning habitually wore his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own. There is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism. Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways. It is for the most part some new variation of his familiar theme—the soul taken in the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and voids. Not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in an even more varied field. Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields—it can hardly be said to have inspired—one only of the Idyls—Pietro of Abano. Old memories of Russia are furbished up in Iván Ivánovitch, odd gatherings [from] the byways of England and America in Ned Bratts, Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph; and he takes from Virgil's hesitating lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treatment of nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in Gerard de Lairesse, a superb example of what he rejected. In all mythology there was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a helping hand to man. The noble "idyl" of Echetlos is thus a counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and Alkestis. Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at Marathon,
"clearing Greek earth of weed
As he routed through the Sabian and rooted up the Mede,"
is one of the many figures which thrill us with Browning's passion for Greece, and he is touched with a kind of magic which it did not lie in his nature often to communicate. But the great successes of the Dramatic Idyls are to be found mainly among the tales of the purely human kind that Browning had been used to tell. Pheidippides belongs to the heroic line of How they brought the Good News and Hervé Riel. The poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and irremediable critical moment, upon which so much of Browning's [psychology] converges, is carried to an unparalleled point of intensity in Clive and Martin Relph. And in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always implicit in Browning but only distinctly apparent in this last decade—the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it. The two worlds—inner and outer—fall more sharply apart; stranger abysses of self-consciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and complacent illusions on the other. Relph's horror of remorse—painted with a few strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'Get you behind the man I am now, you man that I used to be!'—is beyond the comprehension of the friendly peasants; Clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of Muleykeh equally illudes his Arab comrades; the Russian villagers, the Pope, and the lord have to fumble through a long process of argument to the conclusion which for Iván had been the merest matter of fact from the first. Admirable in its quiet irony is the contrast between the stormy debate over his guilt or innocence and his serene security of mind as he sits cutting out a toy for his children:—
"They told him he was free
As air to walk abroad; 'How otherwise?' asked he."
With the "wild men" Halbert and Hob it is the spell of a sudden memory which makes an abrupt rift [between] the men they have seemed to be and the men they prove. Browning in his earlier days had gloried in these moments of disclosure; now they served to emphasise the normal illusion. "Ah me!" sounds the note of the proem to the second series, scornful and sad:—
"Ah me!
So ignorant of man's whole,
Of bodily organs plain to see—
So sage and certain, frank and free,
About what's under lock and key—
Man's soul!"
The volume called Jocoseria (1883) contains some fine things, and abounds with Browning's invariable literary accomplishment and metrical virtuosity, but on the whole points to the gradual disintegration of his genius. "Wanting is—what?" is the significant theme of the opening lyric, and most of the poetry has something which recalls the "summer redundant" of leaf and flower not "breathed above" by vitalising passion. Compared with the Men and Women or the Dramatis Personæ, the Jocoseria as a whole are indeed
"Framework which waits for a picture to frame, ...
Roses embowering with nought they embower."
Browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less apparent here than the astute ironical observer who delights in pricking the bubbles of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human [nature] in unadorned nakedness. Donald is an exposure, savage and ugly, of savagery and ugliness in Sport; Solomon and Balkis a reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. Lilith and Eve unmask themselves under stress of terror, as Balkis and Solomon at the compulsion of the magic ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask. Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is, as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality. Lover, poet, soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong and enrich the saint's: but their fresh idealisms have withered when grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples. But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In the great poem of Ixion, human illusions are still the preoccupying thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating cry of defiance to the phantom-god—man's creature and his ape—[who] may plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that
"From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment
Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o'er him,
Pallid birth of my pain—where light, where light is, aspiring,
Thither I rise, whilst thou—Zeus take thy godship and sink."
And in Never the Time and the Place, the pang of love's aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude of spring.
Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at Gressoney St Jean, a lonely spot high up in the Val d'Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the plainest of vegetable diet. "Delightful Gressoney!" he wrote,
"Who laughest, 'Take what is, trust what may be!'"
And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer. To Browning's old age, as to Goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction. In the Westöstlicher Divan, seventy years earlier, Goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his finger upon the common germs of Eastern and Western thought and poetry. [Browning], far less in actual touch with the Oriental mind, turned to the East in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely European convictions—"Persian garments," which had to be "changed" in the mind of the interpreting reader.
The Fancies have the virtues of good fables,—pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. "Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more"—such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. But such preaching on Browning's lips always carried with it an implicit assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better, and that which is to be spurned because we know too much. Ferishtah's thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game. Against the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human assurance that pain is God's instrument to educate us into pity [and] love; but when it is asked how a just God can single out sundry fellow-mortals
"To undergo experience for our sake,
Just that the gift of pain, bestowed on them,
In us might temper to the due degree
Joy's else-excessive largess,"—
instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human assurance, he falls back upon the unfathomable ways of Omnipotence. If the rifts in the argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song which intervene between the Fancies, as the cicada-note filled the pauses of the broken string. These exquisite lyrics are much more adequate expressions of Browning's faith than the dialogues which professedly embody it. They transfer the discussion from the jangle of the schools and the cavils of the market-place to the passionate persuasions of the heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which all Browning's mysticism had its root. Thus Ferishtah's pragmatic, almost philistine, doctrine of "Plot-culture," by which human life is peremptorily walled in within its narrow round of tasks, "minuteness severed from immensity," is followed by the lyric which tells how Love transcends those limits, making an eternity of time and a universe of solitude. Finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent strains of love-music is caught up, with an added intensity drawn from the poet's personal love and sorrow, in the noble Epilogue. As he listens to the call of Love, the world becomes an enchanted place, resounding with [the] triumph of good and the exultant battle-joy of heroes. But a "chill wind" suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that buoyant faith might be a mirage conjured up by Love itself:—
"What if all be error,
If the halo irised round my head were—Love, thine arms?"
He disdains to answer; for the last words glow with a fire which of itself dispels the chill wind. A faith founded upon love had for Browning a surer guarantee than any founded upon reason; it was secured by that which most nearly emancipated men from the illusions of mortality, and enabled them to see things as they are seen by God.
The Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day (1887) is a more laboured and, save for one or two splendid episodes, a less remarkable achievement than Ferishtah. All the burly diffuseness which had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal of lightly-knit facility and bland oracular pithiness, here has its way without stint, and no more songs break like the rush of birds' wings upon the dusty air of colloquy. Thrusting in between the lyrics of Ferishtah and Asolando, these Parleyings recall those other "people of importance" whose intrusive visit broke in upon "the tenderness of Dante." Neither their importance in their own day nor their relative obscurity, for the most part, in ours, had much to do with Browning's choice. They do not illustrate merely his normal interest in [the] obscure freaks and out-of-the-way anomalies of history. The doings of these "people" had once been "important" to Browning himself, and the old man's memory summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be championed or rallied by their quondam disciple. The death of the dearest friend of his later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory. Perhaps the Imaginary Conversations of an older friend and master of Browning's, one even more important in Browning's day and in ours than in his own, and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme. But these Parleyings are conversations only in name. They are not even monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. All the dramatic zest of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. We have glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass an octave, beating time to the simple but stirring old march of Avison "whilom of Newcastle organist"; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn "rough, rude, robustious, homely heart athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls up Bernard Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend Carlyle—"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of mock—melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, [whose] rococo landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of art—the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior" way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure dangerously like an unwitting vindication. These visions of Prometheus on the storm-swept crag, of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that Browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in the Hyperion or the Prometheus Unbound. But it was a foreign idiom to him, and his occasional use of it a tour de force.
Two years only now remained for Browning, and it began to be apparent to his friends that his sturdy health was no longer secure. His way of life underwent no change, he was as active in society as ever, and acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, and added to the burden, always cheerfully endured, of his correspondence. In October 1887 the marriage of his son attached him by a new tie to Italy, and the Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, where "Pen" and his young American wife presently settled, was to be his last, as it was his most magnificent, abode. To Venice he turned his steps each autumn of these last two years; lingering by the way among the mountains or in the beautiful border region at their feet. It was thus that, in the early autumn of 1889, he came yet once again to Asolo. His old friend and hostess, Mrs Arthur Bronson, had discovered a pleasant, airy abode on the old [town-wall], overhanging a ravine, and Asolo, seen from this "castle precipice-encurled," recovered all its old magic. It was here that he put together the disconnected pieces, many written during the last two years in London, others at Asolo itself, which were finally published on the day of his death. The Tower of Queen Cornaro still overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary. Asolando—Facts and Fancies, both titles contain a hint of the ageing Browning,—the relaxed physical energy which allows this strenuous waker to dream (Reverie; Bad Dreams); the flagging poetic power, whose fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic features. The opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:—
"And now a flower is just a flower:
Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man—
Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
Of dyes which, when life's day began,
Round each in glory ran."
The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision decayed; but A Reverie shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in sustaining his faith that the world is governed by Love. Of outward evidence for that conviction Browning saw less and [less]. But age had not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious affinity which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man to the love of man for woman, remained unimpaired. The old man of seventy-seven was still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,—love-lyrics so illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics has refused to accept them as work of his old age. Yet Now and Summum Bonum, and A Pearl, a Girl, with all their apparent freshness and spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the memory. What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,—the moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and earth." But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world—from Dante onwards—has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a marvellous experience. For the rest, Asolando is a miscellany of old and new,—bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience of the nearing end.
Yet no such prescience appears to have been his. His buoyant confidence in his own vitality held its own. He was full of schemes of work. At the end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired for the last time to the Palazzo [Rezzonico]. A month later he caught a bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of December 12 he peacefully died. On the last day of the year his body was laid to rest in "Poets' Corner."