Robert Browning

by C. H. Herford

From worldly noise and dust,
In the sphere which overbrims
With passion and thought,—why, just
Unable to fly, one swims....

Emancipate through passion
And thought,—with sea for sky,
We substitute, in a fashion,
For heaven—poetry."

It is this "emancipation" from our confinement in [the] bonds of prose, commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination, which is the true subject of the poem. But he chooses to convey his meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic characters and situations quite unlike his own. So his "apology for poetry" becomes an item in Don Juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance with light-o'-loves. Fifine herself acquires new importance; the emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her white fingers pressing Juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale constraint." Between these three persons the moving drama is played out, ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser influence. Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an exquisite creation,—a wedded sister of Shakespeare's Hero; Fifine, too, with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills her discordant note vivaciously enough. The principal speaker himself is the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and many-hued piece of portraiture. This Juan is deeply versed in all the activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends. Painting and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is an artist and a poet in the lore of Love.

It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the habitual procedure of Browning's [own]. Juan defends his dealings with the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and intimately what he has. And Browning's "emancipation" is not that of the purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from all his visible environment. The emancipated soul, for him, was rather that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held in posse. This might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest. But his marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal integuments of spirit; he possessed "Elvire" the more securely for having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon innumerable Fifines.

The poem itself—as a defence of his poetic methods—was an "adventure" in which imagination played an unusually splendid part. A succession of brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,—its inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness, its potency, its worth for him. [It] is the water which supports the swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the technical cluster of sounds from which issues "music—that burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night" (c. 41). The whole poem is haunted by the sense of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the apparent meaning of things. Browning's world, else so massive and so indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive pageant in which Truth is present only under a mask, being "forced to manifest itself through falsehood." Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, "we prose-folk" always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. The "dream figures" of the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,—some rich Venetian rendering of a medieval ballade du temps jadis; then Venice itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the enchantment of Schumann's Carnival, only to resolve itself into a vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science, which, seemingly "fixed as fate, not fairy-work," yet

"tremblingly grew blank
From bright, then broke afresh in triumph,—ah, but sank
As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein
O' the very marble wound its way."

The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister once more in France. This time, however, not at [Croisic] but Saint Aubin—the primitive hamlet on the Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his attachment to Joseph Milsand. At a neighbouring village was another old friend, Miss Thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place. They walked along a narrow cliff-path: "The sea-coast far below our feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow snapdragon lining the paths.... We entered the Brownings' house. The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond—a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table." A misunderstanding, now through the good offices of Milsand happily removed, had clouded the friendship of Browning and Miss Thackeray; and his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem which he dedicated to his "fair friend." The very title is jest—an outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake—"British man with British maid"; the country of the "Red-cotton Night-cap" being in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already nicknamed "White-cotton Night-cap Country," from the white lawn head-dress of the Norman women. Nothing so typical and everyday could set Browning's imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white, innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be "wrong and red and picturesque," and vary "by a splotch the righteous flat of insipidity."

The story of Miranda the Paris jeweller and his mistress, Clara de Millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently. Time had not mellowed the raw crudity of this "splotch," which Browning found recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French newspapers of that very August; the final judgment of the court at Caen ("Vire") being actually pronounced while he wrote. The poet followed on the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a little of his methods. If any poem of Browning's may be compared to versified special correspondence, it is this. He tells the story, in his own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which every pretence of poetry is usually remote. What was it in this rather sordid tale that arrested him? Clearly the strangely mingled character of Miranda. Castile and Paris contend in his blood; and his love adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an ecstasy of fantastic devotion. His sins are commonplace and prosaic enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners—confused and violent gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself from the bonds of his own impurity. "The heart was wise according to its lights"; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom into coherent practice. A parallel piece of analysis presents Clara as a finished artist in life—a Meissonier of limited but flawless perfection in her unerring [selection] of means to ends. In other words, this not very attractive pair struck Browning as another example of his familiar contrast between those who "try the low thing and leave it done," and those who aim higher and fail. Yet it must be owned that these Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by Browning's hand nor vitalised with his breath. Neither Clara nor Miranda can be compared in dramatic force with his great creations; even Clara's harangue to the Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it—the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail. Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests with an air of allegorical abstraction the "Tower" and the "Turf," and makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control.

The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more on the familiar north coast of France,—this time at the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport. In this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his poems—Aristophanes' Apology (published April 1875). It was not Browning's way to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion, the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an admirable setting for his interpretations of Greek drama; and the charm of that earlier "most delightful of May-month amusements" was perhaps not the less easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted woman-friend of his own. Balaustion is herself full ten years older than at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not only cite Euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest assailant. Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. The first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity; the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic elements of Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic world. Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear. The glory of Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had so many points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to so many root-ideas of Browning's [own], that the reader hesitates between the poet to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom his taste preferred. His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of "Life," a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions, who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his "unintelligible" poetry,—"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]—by a "chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses—

"Mind a-wantoning
At ease of undisputed mastery
Over the body's brood"—