Martin Relph is a story of life-long remorse, self-condemnation and self-denunciation; there is something approaching the supernatural, and yet terribly real, in the figure of the strange old man with a beard as white as snow, standing, on a bright May day, in monumental grief, and exposing his ulcerated heart to the spectators who form for him a kind of posterity. One instant's failure in the probation of life, one momentary syncope of his better nature long years ago, has condemned his whole after-existence to become a climbing of the purgatorial mount, with an agony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth rejoices. Only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a perennial passion of penitence. Ned Bratts may be described as a companion, but a contrasted piece. It is a story of sudden conversion and of penitence taking an immediate and highly effective form. The humour of the poem, which is excellent of its kind, resembles more the humour of Rowlandson than that of Hogarth. The Bedford Court House on the sweltering Midsummer Day, the Puritan recusants, reeking of piety and the cow-house conventicle, the Judges at high jinks upon the bench—to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of conversion, enter Black Ned, the stout publican, and big Tab, his slut of a wife,—these are drawn after the broad British style of humorous illustration, which combines a frank exaggeration of the characteristic lines with, at times, a certain grace in deformity. Here at least is downright belief in the invisible, here is genuine conviction driven home by the Spirit of God and the terror of hell-fire. Black Ned and the slut Tabby as yet may not seem the most suitable additions to the company of the blessed who move singing
In solemn troops and sweet societies;
but when a pair of lusty sinners desire nothing so much as to be hanged, and that forthwith, we may take it that they are resolved, as "Christmas" was, to quit the City of Destruction; and the saints above have learnt not to be fastidious as they bend over repentant rogues. Thanks to the grace of God and John Bunyan's book, husband and wife triumphantly aspire to and attain the gallows; "they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." A wise economy of spiritual force!—for while their effectual calling cannot be gainsaid, the final perseverance of these interesting converts, had they lingered on the pilgrims' way, as Ned is painfully aware, might have been less of a certainty.
Browning's method as a story-teller may be studied with special advantage in Clive. The circumstances under which the tale is related have to be caught at by the reader, which quickens his attention and keeps him on the alert; this device is, of course, not in itself difficult, but to employ it with success is an achievement requiring skill; it is a device proper to the dramatic or quasi-dramatic form; the speaker, who is by no means a Clive, has to betray something of his own character, and at the same time to set forth the character of the hero of his tale; the narrative must tend to a moment of culmination, a crisis; and that this should involve a paradox—Clive's fear, in the present instance, being not that the antagonist's pistol, presented at his head, should be discharged but rather that it should be remorsefully or contemptuously flung away—gives the poet an opportunity for some subtle or some passionate casuistry. The effect of the whole is that of a stream or a shock from an electric battery of mind, for which the story serves as a conductor. It is not a simple but a highly complex species of narrative. In Muléykeh, one of the most delightful of Browning's later poems, uniting, as it does, the poetry of the rapture of swift motion with the poetry of high-hearted passion, the narrative leads up to a supreme moment, and this resolves itself through a paradox of the heart. Shall Hóseyn recover his stolen Pearl of a steed, but recover her dishonoured in the race, or abandon her to the captor with her glory untarnished? It is he himself who betrays himself to loss and grief, for to perfect love, pride in the supremacy of the beloved is more than possession; and thus as Clive's fear was courage, as Ivan's violation of law was obedience to law, so Hóseyn's loss is Hóseyn's gain. In each case Browning's casuistry is not argumentative; it lies in an appeal to some passion or some intuition that is above our common levels of passion or of insight, and his power of uplifting his reader for even a moment into this higher mood is his special gift as a poet. We can return safely enough to the common ground, but we return with a possession which instructs the heart.
A mood of acquiescence, which does not displace the moods of aspiration and of combat but rather floats above them as an atmosphere, was growing familiar to Browning in these his elder years. He had sought for truth, and had now found all that earth was likely to yield him, of which not the least important part was a conviction that much of our supposed knowledge ends in a perception of our ignorance. He was now disposed to accept what seemed to be the providential order that truth and error should mingle in our earthly life, that truth should be served by illusion; he would not rearrange the disposition of things if he could. He was inclined to hold by the simple certainties of our present life and to be content with these as provisional truths, or as temporary illusions which lead on towards the truth. In the Pisgah Sights of the Pacchiarotto volume he had imagined this mood of acquiescence as belonging to the hour of death. But old age in reality is an earlier stage in the process of dying, and with all his ardour and his energy, Browning was being detached from the contentions and from some of the hopes and aspirations of life. And because he was detached he could take the world to his heart, though in a different temper from that of youth or middle age; he could limit his view to things that are near, because their claim upon his passions had diminished while their claim upon his tenderness had increased. He could smile amiably, for to the mood of acquiescence a smile seems to be worth more than an argument. He could recall the thoughts of love, and reanimate them in his imagination, and could love love with the devotion of an old man to the most precious of the things that have been. Some of an old man's jests may be found in Jocoseria, some of an old man's imaginative passion in Asolando, and in both volumes, and still more clearly in Ferishtah's Fancies may be seen an old man's spirit of acquiescence, or to use a catch-word of Matthew Arnold, the epoch of concentration which follows an epoch of expansion. But the embrace of earth and the things of earth is like the embrace, with a pathos in its ardour, which precedes a farewell. From the first he had recognised the danger on the one hand of settling down to browse contentedly in the paddock of our earthly life, and on the other hand the danger of ignoring our limitations, the danger of attempting to "thrust in earth eternity's concerns." In his earlier years he had chiefly feared the first of these two dangers, and even while pointing out, as in Paracelsus, the errors of the seeker for absolute knowledge or for absolute love, he had felt a certain sympathy with such glorious transgressors. He had valued more than any positive acquisitions of knowledge those "grasps of guess, which pull the more into the less." Now such guesses, such hopes were as precious to him as ever, but he set more store than formerly by the certainties—certainties even if illusions—of the general heart of man. These are the forms of thought and feeling divinely imposed upon us; we cannot do better than to accept them; but we must accept them only as provisional, as part of our education on earth, as a needful rung of the ladder by which we may climb to higher things. And the faith which leads to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the divine order of our lives. In autumn come for spirits rightly attuned these pellucid halcyon days of the Indian summer.
In Jocoseria, which appeared in Browning's seventy-first year (1883), he shows nothing of his boisterous humour, but smiles at our human infirmities from the heights of experience. The prop of Israel, the much-enlightened master, "Eximious Jochanan Ben Sabbathai," when his last hour is at hand has to confess that all his wisdom of life lies in his theoric; in practice he is still an infant; striving presumptuously in boyhood to live an angel, now that he comes to die he is hardly a man. And Solomon himself is no more than man; the truth-compelling ring extorts the confession that an itch of vanity still tickles and teazes him; the Queen of Sheba, seeker for wisdom and patroness of culture, after all likes wisdom best when its exponents are young men tall and proper, and prefers to the solution of the riddles of life by elderly monarchs one small kiss from a fool. Lilith in a moment of terror acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their make-believe decorums, and Adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see through what is transparent. These are harmless jests at the ironies of life. Browning's best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the series of his latest lyrical poems, begun in the exquisite prologue to La Saisiaz and the graceful epilogue to The Two Poets of Croisic, and continued in the songs of Ferishtah's Fancies and Asolando—not the least valuable part of the work of his elder years. His strength in this volume of 1883 is put into that protest of human righteousness against immoral conceptions of the Deity uttered by Ixion from his wheel of torture. Rather than obey an immoral supreme Power, as John Stuart Mill put it, "to Hell I will go"—and such is the cry of Browning's victim of Zeus. He is aware that in his recognition of righteousness he is himself superior to the evil god who afflicts him; and as this righteousness is a moral quality, and no creation of his own consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises past Zeus to the Potency above him, after which even the undeveloped sense of a Caliban blindly felt when he discovered a Quiet above the bitter god Setebos; but the Quiet of Caliban is a negation of those evil attributes of the supreme Being, which he reflects upwards from his own gross heart, not the energy of righteousness which Ixion demands in his transcendent "Potency." Into this poem went the energy of Browning's heart and imagination; some of his matured wisdom entered into Jochanan Hakkadosh, of which, however, the contents are insufficient to sustain the length. The saint and sage of Israel has at the close of his life found no solution of the riddle of existence. Lover, bard, soldier, statist, he has obtained in each of his careers only doubts and dissatisfaction. Twelve months added to a long life by the generosity of his admirers, each of whom surrenders a fragment of his own life to prolong that of the saint, bring him no clearer illumination—still all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Only at the last, when by some unexpected chance, a final opportunity of surveying the past and anticipating the future is granted him, all has become clear. Instead of trying to solve the riddle he accepts it. He sees from his Pisgah how life, with all its confusions and contrarieties, is the school which educates the soul and fits it for further wayfaring. The ultimate faith of Jochanan the Saint had been already expressed by Browning:
Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
Life there, outlying!
Roughness and smoothness,
Shine and defilement,
Grace and uncouthness:
One reconcilement.
But even to his favourite disciple the sage is unable so to impart the secret that Tsaddik's mind shall really embrace it.
The spirit of the saint of Israel is also the spirit of that wise Dervish of Browning's invention (1884), the Persian Ferishtah. The volume is frankly didactic, and Browning, as becomes a master who would make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures. In reading Ferishtah's Fancies we might suppose that we were in the Interpreter's House, and that the Interpreter himself was pointing a moral with the robin that has a spider in his mouth, or the hen walking in a fourfold method towards her chickens. The discourses of the Dervish are in the main theological or philosophical; the lyrics, which are interposed between the discourses or discussions, are amatory. In Persian Poetry much that at first sight might be taken for amatory has in its inner meaning a mystical theological sense. Browning reverses the order of such poetry; he gives us first his doctrine concerning life or God, and gives it clothed in a parable; then in a lyric the subject is retracted into the sphere of human affections, and the truth of theology condenses itself into a corresponding truth respecting the love of man and woman.
Throughout the series of poems it is not a Persian Dervish who is the speaker and teacher; we hear the authentic voice of the Dervish born in Camberwell in the year 1812—Ferishtah-Browning. The doctrine set forth is the doctrine of Browning; the manner of speech is the manner of the poet. The illustrations and imagery are often Oriental; the ideas are those of a Western thinker; yet no sense of discordance is produced. The parable of the starving ravens fed by an eagle serves happily as an induction; let us become not waiters on providence, but workers with providence; and to feed hungry souls is even more needful than to feed hungry bodies: