So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.
After The Ring and the Book, poor Nature, as one of Browning's mistresses, was somewhat neglected for a time, and he gave himself up to ugly representations of what was odd or twisted in humanity, to its smaller problems, like that contained in Fifine at the Fair, to its fantastic impulses, its strange madnesses, its basenesses, even its commonplace crimes. These subjects were redeemed by his steady effort to show that underneath these evil developments of human nature lay immortal good; and that a wise tolerance, based on this underlying godlikeness in man, was the true attitude of the soul towards the false and the stupid in mankind. This had been his attitude from the beginning. It differentiates him from Tennyson, who did not maintain that view; and at that point he is a nobler poet than Tennyson.
But he became too much absorbed in the intellectual treatment of these side-issues in human nature. And I think that he was left unprotected from this or not held back from it by his having almost given up Nature in her relation to man as a subject for his poetry. To love that great, solemn and beautiful Creature, who even when she seems most merciless retains her glory and loveliness, keeps us from thinking too much on the lower problems of humanity, on its ignobler movements; holds before us infinite grandeur, infinite beauty, infinite order, and suggests and confirms within us eternal aspiration. Those intimations of the ideal and endless perfectness which are dimmed within us by the meaner aspects of human life, or by the sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual and wealth-seeking society present to us, are restored to us by her quiet, order and beauty. When he wrote Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and The Inn Album, Nature had ceased to awaken the poetic passion in him, and his poetry suffered from the loss. Its interest lies in the narrow realm of intellectual analysis, not in the large realm of tragic or joyous passion. He became the dissector of corrupt bodies, not the creator of living beings.
Nevertheless, in Fifine at the Fair there are several intercalated illustrations from Nature, all of which are interesting and some beautiful. The sunset over Sainte-Marie and the lie Noirmoutier, with the birds who sing to the dead, and the coming of the nightwind and the tide, is as largely wrought as the description of the mountain rill—the "infant of mist and dew," and its voyage to the sea is minute and delicate. There is also that magnificent description of a sunset which I have already quoted. It is drawn to illustrate some remote point in the argument, and is far too magnificent for the thing it illustrates. Yet how few in this long poem, how remote from Browning's heart, are these touches of Nature.
Again, in The Inn Album there is a description of an English elm-tree, as an image of a woman who makes marriage life seem perfect, which is interesting because it is the third, and only the third, reference to English scenery in the multitude of Browning's verses. The first is in Pauline, the second in that poem, "Oh, to be in England," and this is the third. The woman has never ceased to gaze
On the great elm-tree in the open, posed
Placidly full in front, smooth hole, broad branch,
And leafage, one green plenitude of May.
... bosomful