[113] Preface to Sordello, ed. 1863.
[114] Sordello, ii. 135.
And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice. The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between men and women was a kindling theme. The names of husband, of wife, of lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those [names] excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about unconscious childhood is all but fled. Children—real children, naïve and inarticulate, like little Fortù—rarely appear in his verse, and those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. In its child pathos The Pied Piper—addressed to a child—stands all but alone among his works. His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and unattached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion, Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as work malignly upon their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls; Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father's house; Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of "the secret of the world," which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love.
More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in Browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the City or the State, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of [material] necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion, or choice. Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. Casa Guidi windows betrayed too much. Two great communities alone moved his imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a common spiritual ideal. And Browning puts the loftiest passion for Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth of a Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal cry of the solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer multitudinous murmur of the great mass. In his defining, isolating imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse.
Browning's interest in "soul" was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of human nature as such. But, on the other hand, human nature stood for too much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies was too keen, to allow him to relish, or [make] much use of, those unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,—the personified abstractions. Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, or in the lofty and noble form of Keats's "Autumn" and Shelley's "West Wind," this powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive and casual strokes to music by Browning's hand. Personality, to interest him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience. It had to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants. The stamp of fashioning intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns him off. He climbs to no Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no Empyrean. His rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground. His Artemis "prologizes" to, his Herakles plays a part in, a human drama; and both are as frankly human themselves as the gods of Homer. Shelley and Keats had rekindled about the faded forms of the Greek gods the elemental Nature-worship from which they had started; Apollo, Hyperion, are again glorious symbols of the "all-seeing" and all-vitalising Sun. Browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats their legends, with the easy rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a mine of ethical and psychological illustration. He can play charmingly, in later years, with the myth of Pan and Luna, of Arion and the dolphin,[115] or of Apollo and the Fates, but idyl gets the better of nature feeling; "maid-moon" Luna is far more maid [than] moon. The spirit of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for Keats, in some symbolic shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of The Englishman in Italy. The spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth in a Prometheus, but realised in a Caponsacchi.
[115] Fifine at the Fair, lxxviii.
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.