Rossetti expresses his first enthusiasm about Men and Women in a word when he calls the poems "my Elixir of Life." To Ruskin these, with other pieces which he now read for the first time, were as he declared in a rebellious mood, a mass of conundrums. "He compelled me," Rossetti adds, "to sit down before him and lay siege for one whole night; the result of which was that he sent me next morning a bulky letter to be forwarded to Browning, in which I trust he told him he was the greatest man since Shakespeare." The poems of the two new volumes were the gradual growth of a considerable number of years; since 1845 their author had published no group of short poems, and now, at the age of forty-three, he had attained the fulness of intellectual and imaginative power, varied experience of life and the artistic culture of Italy. The Dramatis Personae of 1864 exhibits no decline from the high level reached in the volumes of 1855; but is there any later volume of miscellaneous poetry by Browning which, taken as a whole, approaches in excellence the collections of 1855 and 1864?
There is no need now to "lay siege" to the poems of Men and Women; they have expounded themselves, if ever they needed exposition; and the truth is that they are by no means nut-shells into which mottoes meant for the construing of the intellect have been inserted, but fruits rich in colour and perfume, a feast for the imagination, the passions, the spirit in sense, and also for the faculty of thought which lives in the heart of these. If a criticism or a doctrine of life lies in them—and that it should do so means that the poet's total mind has been taken up into his art—Browning conveys his doctrine not as such but as an enthusiasm of living; his generalized truth saturates a medium of passion and of beauty. In the Prologue to Fifine at the Fair he compares the joy of poetry to a swimmer's joy in the sea: the vigour that such disport in sun and sea communicates is the vigour of joyous play; afterwards, if we please, we can ascertain the constituents of sea-water by a chemical analysis; but the analysis will not convey to us the sensations of the sunshine and the dancing brine. One of the blank-verse pieces of Men and Women rebukes a youthful poet of the transcendental school whose ambition is to set forth "stark-naked thought" in poetry. Why take the harp to his breast "only to speak dry words across the strings"? Better hollo abstract ideas through the six-foot Alpine horn of prose. Boys may desire the interpretation into bare ideas of those thronging objects which obsess their senses and their feelings; men need art for the delight of it, and the strength which comes through delight. Better than the meaning of a rose is the rose itself with its spirit enveloped in colour and perfume. And so the poet for men will resemble that old mage John of Halberstadt:
He with a 'look you!' vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
Browning in Men and Women is in truth a John of Halberstadt; he enriches life with colour, warmth, music, romance, not dissociated from thought and intellectual energy, rather possessing and being possessed by these. Not a single poem is "stark-naked thought"; not a single poem is addressed solely to the intellect; even Bishop Blougram is rather a presentation of character than a train of argument or a chain of ideas.
In few of these poems does Browning speak in his own person; the verses addressed to his wife, which present her with "his fifty men and women" and tell of mysteries of love that can never be told, the lines, Memorabilia, addressed to one who had seen Shelley, and Old Pictures in Florence, are perhaps the only exceptions to the dramatic character of the contents of the two volumes. Yet through them all Browning's mind is clearly discernible; and even his central convictions, his working creed of life, can with no sense of uncertainty be gathered from them. To attribute to the writer the opinions and the feelings of his dramatis personae would of course be the crudest of mistakes. But when an idea persists through many poems written at various times and seasons, when it appears and reappears under various clothings of circumstance, when it is employed as if it had a crucial value, when it becomes a test or touchstone of character, we cannot doubt that it is an intimate possession of the writer's mind. Such an idea is not a mere playmate but rather a confidant. When, again, after a tangle of casuistic reasoning or an embroilment of contending feelings, some idea suddenly flashes forth, and like a sword sunders truth from falsehood and darkness from light, we may be assured that it has more than a dramatic value. And, once more, if again and again the same idea shows its power over the feelings and inspires elevated lyrical utterance, or if in pieces of casuistical brain-work it enters as a passionate element and domineers by its own authority, if it originates not debate but song or that from which song is made, we know that the writer's heart has embraced it as a truth of the emotions.
Because Browning had his own well-defined view of truth, he could confidently lend his mind away to his fifty or his hundred men and women. They served to give his ideas a concrete body. By sympathy and by intelligence he widened the basis of his own existence. If the poet loses himself to find himself again through sympathy with external nature, how much more and in how many enriching ways through sympathy with humanity! Thus new combinations of thought and feeling are effected. Thus a kind of experiment is made with our own ideas by watching how they behave when brought into connection with these new combinations. Truth is relative, and the best truth of our own is worth testing under various conditions and circumstances. The truth or falsehood which is not our own has a right to say the best for itself that can be said. Let truth and falsehood grapple. Let us hear the counter-truth or the rival falsehood which is the complement or the criticism of our own, and hear it stated with the utmost skill. A Luther would surely be the wiser for an evening spent in company with a Blougram; and Blougram has things to tell us which Luther never knew. But precisely because truth is relative we must finally adhere to our own perceptions; they constitute the light for us; and the justice we would do to others we must also render to ourselves. A wide survey may be made from a fixed centre. "Universal sympathies," Miss Barrett wrote in one of the letters to her future husband, "cannot make a man inconsistent, but on the contrary sublimely consistent. A church tower may stand between the mountains and the sea, looking to either, and stand fast: but the willow tree at the gable-end blown now toward the north and now toward the south, while its natural leaning is due east or west, is different altogether ... as different as a willow tree from a church tower."[[63]]
The fifty poems of Men and Women, with a few exceptions, fall into three principal groups—those which interpret various careers or moods or moments of love; those which deal with the fine arts—painting, poetry, music—and with these we may class, as kindred in spirit, that poem which has for its subject the passionate pursuit of knowledge, A Grammarian's Funeral; and thirdly, those which are connected with religious thought and feeling, or present scenes from the history of religions. Two poems may be called descriptive; both are Italian; both are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, Up at a Villa—Down in the City, is made up of humorous observations of Italian city and country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an Italian person of quality; the other, "De Gustibus—," which contrasts the happy quietudes of English landscape with the passionate landscape of the South, has romance at the heart of its realism and an ardour of sentiment underlying its pictorial vividness. The Patriot is again Italian, suggested perhaps by the swift revolutions and restorations which Browning had witnessed in Florence, and again it uses with striking effect the principle of contrast; the patriot who a year ago had his intoxicating triumph is now on his way to the scaffold. His year's toil for the good of his people has turned into a year's misdeeds, his life is a failure; but Browning characteristically wrings a victory out of defeat; the crowd at the shambles' gate may hoot; it is better so, for now the martyr can throw himself upon God, the Paymaster of all his labourers at the close of day. The most remarkable of these poems, which refuse to take their places in a group, is that forlorn romance of weary and depressed heroism, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. It is in the main a fantaisie of description; but involved with the descriptive study is a romantic motive. The external suggestions for the poem were no more than the words from King Lear which form the title, a tower seen in the Carrara mountains, a painting seen in Paris, and the figure of a horse in the tapestry of the drawing-room of Casa Guidi.[[64]] In his own mind Browning may have put the question: Of all the feats of knight-errantry which is the hardest? Not to combat with dragons, or robbers, or salvage men; not to bear down rival champions in a rapture of battle. Not these, but to cling to a purpose amid all that depresses the senses at a time when the heart within us is also failing; to advance where there is nothing to arouse energy by opposition, and everything without and within to sap the very life of the soul. Childe Roland is himself hopeless and almost heartless; the plain to which the leering cripple had pointed and over which he rides is created in the utter indigence of nature—a very nightmare of poverty and mean repulsiveness. And yet he endures the test, and halts only when he faces the Dark Tower and blows the blast upon his horn. Browning was wise to carry his romance no further; the one moment of action is enough; it is the breaking of the spell, the waking from the nightmare, and at that point the long-enduring quester may be left. We are defrauded of nothing by the abrupt conclusion.
In the poems which treat of the love of man and woman Browning regards the union of soul with soul as the capital achievement of life, and also as affording one of its chief tests. When we have formed these into a group we perceive that the group falls in the main into two divisions—poems which tell of attainment, and poems which tell of failure or defeat. Certain persons whose centre is a little hard kernel of egoism may be wholly disqualified for the test created by a generous passion. Browning does not belabour with heavy invective the Pretty Woman of his poem, who is born without a heart; she is a flower-like creature and of her kind is perfect; only the flower is to be gazed at, not gathered; or, if it must be gathered, then at last to be thrown away. The chief distinction between the love of man and the love of woman, implied in various poems, is this—the man at his most blissful moment cries "What treasures I have obtained!" the woman cries "What treasures have I to surrender and bestow?" Hence the singleness and finality in the election of passion made by a woman as compared with a man's acquisitiveness of delight. The unequal exchange of a transitory for an enduring surrender of self is the sorrow which pulsates through the lines of In a Year, as swift and broken with pauses as the beating of a heart:
Dear, the pang is brief,
Do thy part,
Have thy pleasure! How perplexed
Grows belief!
Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it and what comes next?
Is it God?