Ah, Love! but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged.
—James Lee's Wife.
That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.
—Epilogue.
The catastrophe of June 29, 1861, closed with appalling suddenness the fifteen years' married life of Browning. "I shall grow still, I hope," he wrote to Miss Haworth, a month later, "but my root is taken, and remains." The words vividly express the valour in the midst of desolation which animated one little tried hitherto by sorrow. The Italian home was shattered, and no thought of even attempting a patched-up existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred to him; even the neighbourhood of the spot in which all that was mortal of her had been laid had no power to detain him. But his departure was no mere flight from scenes [intolerably] dear. He had their child to educate and his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution to the work, as one who had indeed had everything, but who was as little inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it. After visiting his father in Paris—the "dear nonno" of his wife's charming letters[39]—he settled in London, at first in lodgings, then at the house in Warwick Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his home. Something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of Fifine. Browning had been that "Householder," had gone through the dragging days and nights,—
"All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights,
All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then
All the fancies,"—
perhaps, among them, that of the "knock, call, cry," and the pang and rapture of the visionary meeting. Certainly one of the effects of his loss was to accentuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked beneath Browning's genial sociality. The world from which his saint had been snatched looked very common, sordid, and mean, and he resented its intrusiveness on occasion with startling violence. When proposals were made in 1863 in various quarters to publish her life, he turned like a wild beast upon the "blackguards" who "thrust their paws into his bowels" by prying into his intimacies. [To] the last he dismissed similar proposals by critics of the highest status with a cavalier bluntness highly surprising to persons who only knew him as the man of punctilious observance and fastidious good form. For the rest, London contained much that was bound by degrees to temper the gloom and assuage the hostility. Florence and Rome could furnish nothing like the circle of men of genius and varied accomplishment, using like himself the language of Shakespeare and Milton, in which he presently began to move as an intimate. Thackeray, Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Rossetti, Leighton, Woolner, Prinsep, and many more, added a kind of richness to his life which during the last fifteen years he had only enjoyed at intervals. And the flock of old friends who accepted Browning began to be reinforced by a crowd of unknown readers who proclaimed him. Tennyson was his loyal comrade; but the prestige of Tennyson's popularity had certainly blocked many of the avenues of Browning's fame, appealing as the Laureate largely did to tastes in poetry which Browning rudely traversed or ignored. On the Tennysonian reader pur sang Browning's work was pretty sure to make the impression so frankly described by Frederick Tennyson to his brother, of "Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities." Even among these intimates of his own generation were doubtless some who, with F. Tennyson again, believed him to be "a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness," but who yet [held] "his school of poetry" to be "the most grotesque conceivable." This was the tone of the 'Fifties, when Tennyson's vogue was at its height. But with the 'Sixties there began to emerge a critical disposition to look beyond the trim pleasances of the Early Victorians to more daring romantic adventure in search of the truth that lies in beauty, and more fearless grip of the beauty that lies in truth. The genius of the pre-Raphaelites began to find response. And so did the yet richer and more composite genius of Browning. Moreover, the immense vogue won by the poetry of his wife undoubtedly prepared the way for his more difficult but kindred work. If Pippa Passes counts for something in Aurora Leigh, Aurora Leigh in its turn trained the future readers of The Ring and the Book.
[39] His father beautifully said of Mrs Browning's portrait that it was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible.
The altered situation became apparent on the publication, in rapid succession, in 1864, of Browning's Dramatis Personæ and Mr Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. Both volumes found their most enthusiastic readers at the universities. "All my new cultivators are young men," Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious humour, "more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which they 'always meant to say,' and never did." The volume included practically all that Browning had actually written since 1855,—less than a score of pieces,—the somewhat slender harves [of] nine years. But during these later years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar letters as his "murder-poem," and was ultimately known as The Ring and the Book. As a whole, the Dramatis Personæ stands yet more clearly apart from Men and Women than that does from all that had gone before. Both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and poignant splendour of autumn. The sense of tragic loss broods over all its music. In lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible strength and easy poise of wing: falling back now upon the personal convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life. Rabbi ben Ezra and Abt Vogler, A Death in the Desert, are as noble poetry as Andrea del Sarto or The Grammarian's Funeral; but it is a poetry less charged with the "incidents" of any other soul than his own; and, on the other hand, Dis Aliter Visum and Youth and Art, and others, effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of Men and Women. The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned [upon] life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in Too Late, with her thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in Dis Aliter Visum; and they have homely names, like "Lee" or "Lamb" or "Brown," not gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous "Gigadibs." "Sludge" stands on a different footing; for it is dramatically expressive, as these are not. The legend of the gold-haired maiden of Pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism than was heard in Galuppi's "chill" music of the vanished beauties of Venice. If we may by no means say that the glory of humanity has faded for Browning, yet its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,—a "grace not theirs" brought by love "settling unawares" upon minds "level and low, burnt and bare" in themselves. And he dwells now on desolate and desert scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy. "This is a wild little place in Brittany," he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863; "close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely—one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.... If I could I would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the window." The wild coast scenery falls in with the desolate mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the Isle with the primitive fancies of [Caliban]; the arid desert holds in its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the lips of the dying Apostle. In the poetry of Men and Women we see the ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in Dramatis Personæ, the processes of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate. Doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying John and of the Third Speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by "the happy prompt instinctive way of youth," and the way to it lay through moods not unlike those of James Lee's wife, whose problem, like his own, was how to live when the answering love was gone. His "fire," like hers, was made "of shipwreck wood",[40] and her words "at the window" can only be an echo of his—
"Ah, Love! but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky's deranged:
Summer has stopped."
[40] The second section of James Lee's Wife, By the Fireside, cannot have been written without a conscious, and therefore a purposed and significant, reference to the like-named poem in Men and Women, which so exquisitely plays with the intimate scenery of his home-life.
As her problem is another life-setting of his, so she feels her way towards its solution through processes which cannot have been strange to him. She walks "along the Beach," or "on the Cliff," or "among the rocks," and the voices of sea and wind ("Such a soft sea and such a mournful wind!" he wrote to Miss Blagden) become speaking symbols in her preoccupied mind. Not at all, however, in the fashion of the "pathetic fallacy." She is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and Browning puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion interpreted the wailing of the wind.[41] If Nature has aught to teach, it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that Love, like the genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what seemed mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and barren spirit,—the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they were.