[118] Fifine at the fair, cxxiv.
And here at length if not before we have a clear glimpse of the athlete who lurks behind the explorer. Browning's joy in imagining impediment and illusion [was] only another aspect of his joy in the spiritual energy which answers to the spur of difficulty and "works" through the shows of sense; and this other joy found expression in a poetry of soul yet more deeply tinged with the native hue of his mind. "From the first, Power was, I knew;" and souls were the very central haunt and focus of its play. Not that strong natures, as such, have much part in Browning's poetic-world; the strength that allured his imagination was not the strength that is rooted in nerve or brain, slowly enlarging with the build of the organism, but the strength that has suddenly to be begotten or infused, that leaps by the magic of spiritual influence from heart to heart. If Browning multiplies and deepens the demarcations among material things, he gives his souls a rare faculty of transcending them. Bright spiritual beings like Pippa shed their souls innocently and unwittingly about like a spilth of "X-rays," and the irradiation penetrates instantly the dense opposing integuments of passion, cupidity, and worldliness. At all times in his life these accesses of spiritual power occupied his imagination. Cristina's momentary glance and the Lady of Tripoli's dreamed-of face lift their devotees to completeness:—
"She has lost me, I have gained her,
Her soul's mine, and now grown perfect
I shall pass my life's remainder."
Forty years later, Browning told with far greater realistic power and a grim humour suited to the theme, [the] "transmutation" of Ned Bratts. Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of Abib:—
"The very God! Think, Abib, dost thou think,—
So the All-great were the All-loving too"—
and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more splendid vision breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying Paracelsus, and he has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his darkened chamber crying that—
"Spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June,—when harebells grow,
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to me."
But it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A whole class of his characters—the most familiarly "Browningesque" division of them all—was shaped under the sway of this master-passion; the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail, baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of Old Painters in Florence, and The Last Ride Together, and The Lost Mistress; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the Statue and the Bust, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter. But his [very] preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No kind of vivid consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little, compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving, rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into "an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush, strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these songsters,—the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing; the intolerable pathos of Ye Banks and Braes, or of
"We twa hae paidl't in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,"