[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]