which was so congenial to the realist in Browning; "the clear baldness—all his head one brow"—and the surging flame of red from cheek to temple; the huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously triumphant, the "pursed mouth's pout aggressive," and "the beak supreme above," "beard whitening under like a vinous foam."
[59] Arist. Ap., p. 698.
[60] Ib., p. 688.
Balaustion is herself the first to recognise the divinity shrouded in this half satyr-like form: in some of the [finest] verses of the poem she compares him to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen peer
"large-looming from his wave,
. . . . . . . . . .
A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship,"
while below the surface all was "tail splash, frisk of fin." And when Balaustion has recited her poet's masterpiece of tragic pathos, Aristophanes lays aside the satirist a moment and attests his affinity to the divine poets by the noble song of Thamyris. The "transcript from Euripides" itself is quite secondary in interest to this vivid and powerful dramatic framework. Far from being a vital element in the action, like the recital of the Alkestis, the reading of the Hercules Furens is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of Browning's Alkestis. Yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from Browning's deep sensibility to the pathos of the story. "Large tears," as Mrs Orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read it aloud to her.
The Inn Album is, like Red-cotton Night-cap Country, a versified novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and atmosphere. Once more, as in the Blot in the 'Scutcheon, and in James Lee's Wife, Browning turned for his "incidents in the development [of] souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen. But no halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of the facts; the "James Lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." Everything except his wit and eloquence is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable. A thief, as Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his theft the more heroic crime of murder; but Browning's Elder Man compromises even the professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady dealings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself would have scouted. In Fifine the Don Juan of tradition was lifted up into and haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed into an equally alien sorriness of prose. But the decisive and commanding figure, for Browning and for his readers, is of course his victim and Nemesis, the Elder Lady. She is as unlike Pompilia as he is unlike Guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs, has once more asserted its power over him. And if Pompilia often recalls his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady may fairly remind us of that of Marion Erle in Aurora Leigh. But many complexities in the working [out] mark Browning's design. The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish. The chance meeting of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been ruined for both,—he, with his scandalous successes growing at last notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor observe,—all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would hardly have occurred to any one else.
The Pacchiarotto volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the previous half-dozen years. Since The Ring and the Book he had become a famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him, and gossiped eagerly about his private life. He himself, mingling freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole accepted him. Yet barriers remained. Poems like the Red-cotton Night-cap Country, the Inn Album, and Fifine had alienated many whom The Ring and the Book had won captive, and embarrassed the defence of some [of] Browning's staunchest devotees. Nobody knew better than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner mind; and he did little to assist their insight. The most affable and accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought themselves competent to teach him his business. This is the main, at least the most dominant, note of Pacchiarotto. It is like an aftermath of Aristophanes' Apology. But the English poet scarcely deigns to defend his art. No beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on his mettle and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics are roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps" officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." Pacchiarotto is a whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in this tour de force, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to killing the music. More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas At the Mermaid, and House, he avails himself of the habitual reticence of Shakespeare to defend by implication his own reserve, not without a passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took Europe by storm [with] the pageant of his broken heart. House is for the most part rank prose, but it sums up incisively in the well-known retort:
"'With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart,' once more!
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"
This "house" image is singularly frequent in this volume. The poet seems haunted by the idea of the barrier walls, which keep off the public gaze, but admit the privileged spirit. In Fears and Scruples it symbolises the reticence of God. In Appearances the "poor room" in which troth was plighted and the "rich room" in which "the other word was spoken" become half human in sympathy. A woman's "natural magic" makes the bare walls she dwells in a "fairy tale" of verdure and song. The prologue seems deliberately to strike this note, with its exquisite idealisation of the old red brick wall and its creepers lush and lithe,—a formidable barrier indeed, but one which spirit and love can pass. For here the "wall" is the unsympathetic throng who close the poet in; there
"I—prison-bird, with a ruddy strife
At breast, and a life whence storm-notes start—
Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing
That's spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free;
Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring
Of the rueful neighbours, and—forth to thee!"