VII.
The love-poetry of the Men and Women volumes, as originally published, was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its contents. It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition of [his] Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, to the Dramatic Lyrics, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the Dramatic Romances. But of Browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half were lovers or occupied with love. Such fertility was natural enough in the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain. Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets: even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets "to the Portuguese." His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of other people, mostly quite unlike his own. The white light of his own perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry brilliant with almost every other hue. No English poet of his century, and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of thwarting conditions. In his way of approaching love Browning strangely blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding conditions. The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the ecstatic unearthly [note] of Shelley. "Love is all" might have served as the text for the whole volume of Browning's love-poetry; but the text is wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are not love. "Love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for most of the love-poems in Men and Women; but some would have had to be assigned to the opposite rubric, "The world triumphing over love." Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his love.
The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan note of defiance. Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a mystically hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion. They may meet and woo "among the ruins," as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve "beside the ruined tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering memories of the ruined city,—a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal car.
"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best."
Another lover, in My Star, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him "dartled red and blue," now a bird, now a flower, was just—a star. More finely touched than either of these is By the Fireside. After One Word More, to which it is obviously akin, it is Browning's most perfect rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, of a rapturous love. The outer world is here neither thrust aside nor fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue and becoming the confidant and executant of its will. A landscape so instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness is hardly to be found elsewhere save in Christabel,—
"We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell,
Till the trouble grew and stirred.
. . . . . . . . . .
A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.
The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done—we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood."
By the Fireside is otherwise memorable as portraying with whatever disguise the Italian home-life of the poet and his wife. The famous description of "the perfect wife" as she sat
"Musing by firelight, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Yonder, my heart knows how"—
remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile form. Yet neither here nor elsewhere did Browning care to dwell upon the finished completeness of the perfect union. His intellectual thirst for the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or unfulfilled fate. The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress; the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in In Three Days. And from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:—
"Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How grey at once is the evening grown—
One star, its chrysolite!
. . . . . . . . . .
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!"
But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not usually choose the harmonious solution of them. The "little less" of incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. It provokes, for instance, the delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics Love in a Life and Life in a Love, variations on the same theme—vain pursuit of the averted face—the one a largo, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the Serenade at the Villa and One Way of Love. A few superbly imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still,—
"Life was dead, and so was light."
The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a meditative Teuton, who, Hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not have her give. The lover in One Way of Love is something of a Teuton too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer to endure—admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a [momentary] ecstasy of remembrance or of idea—and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself in sympathy:—
"She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string; fold music's wing;
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"
Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood. Such a mood furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning's most consummate and one of his loveliest lyrics, The Last Ride Together and Evelyn Hope. "How are we to take it?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter. "As the language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, with its taking melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure," partly because it appeals with naïve audacity at once to Romantic and to Christian sentiment—combining the faith in love's power to seal its object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal immortality—a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and giving in marriage, as Romance demands. The Last Ride Together has attracted a different audience. Its passion is of a rarer and more difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the faith of common minds. This lover dreams of no future [recovery] of more than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the secure faith of Evelyn's lover, that "God creates the love to reward the love," is not his. His mistress will never "awake and remember and understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life, which art and poetry grope after in vain—to possess that supreme moment of earth which, prolonged, is heaven.
"What if heaven be that, fair and strong
At life's best, with our eyes upturned
Whither life's flower is first discerned,
We, fixed so, ever should so abide?
What if we still ride on, we two
With life for ever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity,—
And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"
The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory of possession; the æthereal light and dew are mingled with breath and blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and farther in to the visionary land of Romance.
It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows [thus] to get the better of unreturned love. His women have no such remedia amoris; their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It is women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism, his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of the grief-pangs of his own sex. This distinction is very apparent in the group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. An almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in A Woman's Last Word, In a Year, and Any Wife to Any Husband: the first, with its depth of self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it is, on the verge of the "sentimental." There is a rarer, subtler pathos in Two in the Campagna. The outward scene finds its way to his senses, and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply across it and sting it to a cry. He feels the Campagna about him, with its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:—
"Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air— ...
Such life here, through such length of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers;"
and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also "be unashamed of soul" and probe [love's] wound to the core. But the invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the midst of that "infinite passion" there remain "the finite hearts that yearn." Or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright dawn:—
"All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn spray.
Only, my love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey."
The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir us very deeply. His temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief. Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune—kinder to the man than to the poet—had as yet denied him, in love, the "baptism of sorrow" which has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. It may even be questioned whether all Browning's poetry of love's tragedy will live as long as a few stanzas of Musset's Nuits,—bare, unadorned verses, devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:—
"Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaître,
C'était par une triste nuit.
L'aile des vents battait à ma fenêtre;
J'étais seul, courbé sur mon lit.
J'y regardais une place chérie,
Tiède encor d'un baiser brûlant;
Et je songeais comme la femme oublie,
Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie,
Qui se déchirait lentement.
Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille,
Des cheveux, des débris d'amour.
Tout ce passé me criait à l'oreille
Ses éternels serments d'un jour.
Je contemplais ces réliques sacrées,
Qui me faisaient trembler la main:
Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorées,
Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurées
Ne reconnaîtront plus demain!"[37]
[37] Musset, Nuit de décembre.
The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of fainter and feebler "wars of love"—embryonic or simulated forms of passion which stood still farther from his personal experience. A Light Woman, A Pretty Woman, and Another Way of Love are refined studies in this world of half tones. But the most important and individual poem of this group is The Statue and the Bust, an excellent example of the union in Browning of the Romantic temper with a peculiar mastery of everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates Romance. The duke and the lady are simpler and slighter Hamlets—Hamlets who have no agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers. The poet's indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not appreciate the extreme [subtlety] of Browning's use of figure. He was at once too much and too little of a casuist,—too habituated to fine distinctions and too unaware of the pitfalls they often present to others,—to understand that in condemning his lovers for wanting the energy to commit a crime he could be supposed to imply approval of the crime they failed to commit.
Lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry belong his rare and fugitive "dreams" of love. Women and Roses has an intoxicating swiftness and buoyancy of music. But there is another and more sinister kind of love-dream—the dream of an unloved woman. Such a dream, with its tragic disillusion, Browning painted in his poignant and original In a Balcony. It is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire interest is concentrated. The three vivid and impressive character-heads stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background absolutely blank and void. Though the scene is laid in a court and the heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political intrigue, no conflict between the rival attractions of love and power, as in Colombe's Birthday. Love is the absorbing preoccupation of this society, the ultimate ground of all undertakings. There is vague talk of diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, of public thanksgivings; but the statesman who has achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a girl, and the aged queen whom he has so successfully served has secretly dreamed all the time, [though] already wedded, of being his. For a brilliant young minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of high treason. In its social presuppositions this community belongs to a world as visionary as the mystic dream-politics of M. Maeterlinck. But, those presuppositions granted, everything in it has the uncompromising clearness and persuasive reality that Browning invariably communicates to his dreams. The three figures who in a few hours taste the height of ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or severance, are drawn with remarkable psychologic force and truth. For all three love is the absorbing passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully contrasted with the reflected joys of the painter or the poet. Norbert's noble integrity is of a kind which mingles in duplicity and intrigue with disastrous results; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to act a part; but he can control the secret hunger of his heart and give no sign, until the consummate hour arrives when he may
"resume
Life after death (it is no less than life,
After such long unlovely labouring days)
And liberate to beauty life's great need
O' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work,
Suppress'd itself erewhile."
In the ecstasy of release from that suppression, every tree and flower seems to be an embodiment of the harmonious freedom he had so long foregone, as Wordsworth, chafing [under] his unchartered freedom, saw everywhere the willing submission to Duty. Even
"These statues round us stand abrupt, distinct,
The strong in strength, the weak in weakness fixed,
The Muse for ever wedded to her lyre,
Nymph to her fawn, and Silence to her rose:
See God's approval on his universe!
Let us do so—aspire to live as these
In harmony with truth, ourselves being true!"
But it is the two women who attract Browning's most powerful handling. One of them, the Queen, has hardly her like for pity and dread. A "lavish soul" long starved, but kindling into the ecstasy of girlhood at the seeming touch of love; then, as her dream is shattered by the indignant honesty of Norbert, transmuted at once into the daemonic Gudrun or Brynhild, glaring in speechless white-heat and implacable frenzy upon the man who has scorned her proffered heart and the hapless girl he has chosen.[38] Between these powerful, [rigid], and simple natures stands Constance, ardent as they, but with the lithe and palpitating ardour of a flame. She is concentrated Romance. Her love is an intense emotion; but some of its fascination lies in its secrecy,—
"Complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs,
Long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look";
she shrinks from a confession which "at the best" will deprive their love of its spice of danger and make them even as their "five hundred openly happy friends." She loves adventure, ruse, and stratagem for their own sake. But she is also romantically generous, and because she "owes this withered woman everything," is eager to sacrifice her own hopes of happiness.
[38] An anecdote to which Prof. Dowden has lately called attention (Browning, p. 66) describes Browning in his last years as demurring to the current interpretation of the dénoûment. Some one had remarked that it was "a natural sequence that the guard should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom." "'Now I don't quite think that,' answered Browning, as if he were following out the play as a spectator. 'The queen has a large and passionate temperament.... She would have died by a knife in her heart. The guard would have come to carry away her dead body.'" The catastrophe here suggested is undoubtedly far finer tragedy. But we cannot believe that this was what Browning originally meant to happen. That Norbert and Constance expect "doom" is obvious, and the queen's parting "glare" leaves the reader in no doubt that they are right. They may, nevertheless, be wrong; but what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, and the throwing open of the doors? The queen has in any case not died on the stage, for she had left it; and if she died outside, how should they have come "to carry away her dead body"?
Were it not for its unique position in Browning's poetry, one might well be content with a passing tribute to the great love canticle which closes Men and Women—the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense the nucleus, of the whole. But here, for "once, and only once, and for one only," not only the dramatic instinct, which habitually coloured all his speech, but the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose his most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately overcome—overcome, however, only in order, as it were, to explain and justify their more habitual sway. All the poetry in it is reached [through] the endeavour to find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be told. The poet is a high priest, entering with awed steps the sanctuary which even he cannot tread without desecration save after divesting himself of all that is habitual and of routine,—even the habits of his genius and the routine of his art. Unable to divest himself of his poetry altogether, for he has no other art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak, for once, not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, but "in his true person." And he strips off the veil of his art and speaks in his own person only to declare that speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite symbol of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incommunicable to the apprehension of the world,—the moon's other face with all its "silent silver lights and darks," undreamed of by any mortal. "Heaven's gift takes man's abatement," and poetry itself may only hint at the divinity of perfect love. The One Word More was written in September 1855, shortly before the publication of the volume it closed, as the old moon waned over the London roofs. Less than six years later the "moon of poets" had passed for ever from his ken.