VIII.
What, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life were the points of special attraction for Browning? To put it in a word, the same fundamental instincts of the senses and the imagination which we have watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally determined the complexion of its persons. The joy in pure and intense colour, in abruptness of line and intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and sudden disclosure and transformation,—all these characteristics have their analogies in Browning's feeling for the complexion, morphology, and dynamics of what he calls the soul. Just as this lover of crowded labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long procession of Browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure, intense, immaculate spiritual light,—Pippa, Pompilia, the David of the earlier Saul. Something of the strange charm of [these] naïvely beautiful beings springs from their isolation. That detachment from the bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness. They start into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw. Browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet of a kind of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness. Pippa would hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of Browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers,—the loneliness neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and serene. Wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as well as from their fellow-men. The little "H.C., six years old," is "a dewdrop which the morn brings forth," that
"at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slips in a moment out of life."
Pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her roots in earth; she is not the dewdrop but the flower.
But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which seriously engaged Browning's imagination. His own intense isolating self-consciousness infused itself into them. Each is a little island kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely intelligible [to] the foreigner. Hence his persistent use of the dramatic monologue. Every man had his point of view, and his right to state his case. "Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour had its special truth and worth. His study of character is notoriously occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. His lovers miss the clue; if they find it, as in By the Fireside, the collapse of the barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked to explain it.
[116] R.B. to E.B.B., i. 6.
And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "The care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in Sordello, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it. The abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not merely his agility of mind but his æsthetic relish for the Gothic richness and fretted intricacy that result. The bishop [of] St Praxed's monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,—anxious entreaty to his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph. The larger tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his "chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus, advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment." Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured by vivid moments,—the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through rifts and chinks. A moment of speech with Shelley stands out, a brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of Martin Relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive; the whole complex story of Pompilia focuses in the "splendid minute and no more" in which she is "saved"; the lover's whole life is summed up in "some moment's product" when "the soul declares itself,"[117] or utters the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was missed. "It once might have been, once only," is the refrain of the lover's regret in Browning, as "once and only once and for one only" is the keynote of his triumph. In the contours of event and circumstance, as in those of material objects, [he] loves jagged angularity, not harmonious curve. "Our interest's in the dangerous edge of things,"—
"The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist;"
where an alien strain violently crosses the natural course of kind; and these are only extreme examples of the abnormal nature which always allured and detained Browning's imagination, though it was not always the source of its highest achievement. Ivánovitch, executing justice under the forms of murder, Caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms of an elopement, the savagery of Halbert and Hob unnerved by an abrupt reminiscence,—it is in these suggestive and pregnant situations, at the meeting-points of apparently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that Browning habitually found or placed those of his characters who represent any class or kind at all.
[117] By the Fireside.
The exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of Browning's imagination equally left their vivid impress upon his treatment of character. If the sharp nodosities of character caught his eye, its mysterious recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity; this lover of "clefts," this pryer among tangled locks and into the depths of flower-bells, peered into all the nooks and chambers of the soul with inexhaustible enterprise. It is hard to deny that even The Ring and the Book itself suffers something from the unflagging zest with which the poet pursues all the windings of popular [speculation], all the fretwork of Angelo de Hyacinthis's forensic and domestic futilities. The poem is a great poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are "closets to search and alcoves to importune,"—
"The day wears,
And door succeeds door,
We try the fresh fortune,
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre."
For the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct analysis in Sordello, he chose to make his men and women the instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of his delight in the dramatic monologue. He approached all problematic character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed, if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into integument and core. Not that Browning always displays the core; on the contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask. "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." Browning is less concerned to "save" the subjects of his so-called "Special Pleadings" than to imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about them; not naked as God made them, but clothed in the easy undress of their own subtly plausible illusions about [themselves]. But the optimist in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram's—
"Just when we're safest comes a sunset touch."
Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the obstacles it overcame. He imagined yet more vividly than he saw, and the stone wall which forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open door. In later life he came with growing persistence to regard the phenomenal world as a barrier of illusion between man and truth. But instead of chilling his faith, the obstacle only generated that poet's philosophy of the "value of a lie" which perturbs the less experienced reader of Fifine. "Truth" was "forced to manifest itself through falsehood," won thence by the excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy moment, till "through the shows of sense, which ever proving false still promise to be true," the soul of man worked its way to its final union with the soul of God.[118]
[118] Fifine at the fair, cxxiv.
And here at length if not before we have a clear glimpse of the athlete who lurks behind the explorer. Browning's joy in imagining impediment and illusion [was] only another aspect of his joy in the spiritual energy which answers to the spur of difficulty and "works" through the shows of sense; and this other joy found expression in a poetry of soul yet more deeply tinged with the native hue of his mind. "From the first, Power was, I knew;" and souls were the very central haunt and focus of its play. Not that strong natures, as such, have much part in Browning's poetic-world; the strength that allured his imagination was not the strength that is rooted in nerve or brain, slowly enlarging with the build of the organism, but the strength that has suddenly to be begotten or infused, that leaps by the magic of spiritual influence from heart to heart. If Browning multiplies and deepens the demarcations among material things, he gives his souls a rare faculty of transcending them. Bright spiritual beings like Pippa shed their souls innocently and unwittingly about like a spilth of "X-rays," and the irradiation penetrates instantly the dense opposing integuments of passion, cupidity, and worldliness. At all times in his life these accesses of spiritual power occupied his imagination. Cristina's momentary glance and the Lady of Tripoli's dreamed-of face lift their devotees to completeness:—
"She has lost me, I have gained her,
Her soul's mine, and now grown perfect
I shall pass my life's remainder."
Forty years later, Browning told with far greater realistic power and a grim humour suited to the theme, [the] "transmutation" of Ned Bratts. Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of Abib:—
"The very God! Think, Abib, dost thou think,—
So the All-great were the All-loving too"—
and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more splendid vision breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying Paracelsus, and he has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his darkened chamber crying that—
"Spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June,—when harebells grow,
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to me."
But it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A whole class of his characters—the most familiarly "Browningesque" division of them all—was shaped under the sway of this master-passion; the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail, baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of Old Painters in Florence, and The Last Ride Together, and The Lost Mistress; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the Statue and the Bust, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter. But his [very] preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No kind of vivid consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little, compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving, rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into "an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush, strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these songsters,—the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing; the intolerable pathos of Ye Banks and Braes, or of
"We twa hae paidl't in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,"
belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as in [The Confessional], or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated spirit, as in Any Wife to any Husband, or A Woman's Last Word; or into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in The Worst of It or James Lee's Wife. And happiness, equally,—even the lover's happiness,—needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang, when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (By the Fireside)—
"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!"
Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul itself. The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we [have] traced in his types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue, angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's beasts:—
"Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight;"
or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in The Glove or the bright æthereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's head, with its
"membraned wings
So wonderful, so wide,
So sun-suffused;"[120]
or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. "I always love those wild creatures God sets up for themselves," he wrote to Miss Barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them."[121]
[119] Donald.
[120] Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke's excellent chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature.
[121] To E.B.B., 5th Jan. 1846.
Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent. To bear the mark of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or built, [compounded] or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning's imagination hardly found in any other poet in the same degree. The "artificial products" of civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect" added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it added for Wordsworth. His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses, ships, shops. Most of these appealed also to other instincts,—to his joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent emotion. But their "artificiality" was an added attraction. The wedge, for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his muscle. The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing at the festal board. His delight in complex technicalities, in the tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in mere intricacy as such. His mountains [are] gashed and cleft and carved not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous achievements of art. If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible mace; the morning sun pours into Pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl; and Fifine's ear is
"cut
Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[122]
[122] Fifine at the Fair, ii. 325.
Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called
"a rude
Armour ... hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it."[123]
[123] Sordello, i. 135.
And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded Wahrheit and Dichtung of his greatest poem.
Between Dichtung and Wahrheit there was, indeed, in Browning's mind, a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent [teaching] belong equally to his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides.