Life of Robert Browning

by William Sharp

Or, again, this of the sun swinging himself above the dark shoulder of Jura —

"Gay he hails her, and magnific, thrilled her black length burns to gold."

Or, finally, this sounding verse —

"Past the city's congregated peace of homes and pomp of spires."

The other poems later than "The Ring and the Book" are, broadly speaking, of two kinds. On the one side may be ranged the groups which really cohere with "Men and Women". These are "The Inn Album", the miscellaneous poems of the "Pacchiarotto" volume, the "Dramatic Idyls", some of "Jocoseria", and some of "Asolando". "Ferishtah's Fancies" and "Parleyings" are not, collectively, dramatic poems, but poems of illuminative insight guided by a dramatic imagination.* They, and the classical poems and translations (renderings, rather, by one whose own individuality dominates them to the exclusion of that NEARNESS of the original author, which it should be the primary aim of the translator to evoke), the beautiful "Balaustion's Adventure", "Aristophanes' Apology", and "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus", and the third group, which comprises "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau", "Red Cotton Nightcap Country", and "Fifine at the Fair" — these three groups are of the second kind.

—
* In a letter to a friend, Browning wrote: — "I hope and believe
that one or two careful readings of the Poem [Ferishtah's Fancies]
will make its sense clear enough. Above all, pray allow
for the Poet's inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose
there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions.
There was no such person as Ferishtah — the stories are all inventions.
. . . The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose,
as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found
in the Old Book, which the Concocters of Novel Schemes of Morality
put forth as discoveries of their own."
—

Remarkable as are the three last-named productions, it is extremely doubtful if the first and second will be read for pleasure by readers born after the close of this century. As it is impossible, in my narrow limits, to go into any detail about poems which personally I do not regard as essential to the truest understanding of Browning, the truest because on the highest level, that of poetry — as distinct from dogma, or intellectual suasion of any kind that might, for all its aesthetic charm, be in prose — it would be presumptuous to assert anything derogatory of them without attempting adequate substantiation. I can, therefore, merely state my own opinion. To reiterate, it is that, for different reasons, these three long poems are foredoomed to oblivion — not, of course, to be lost to the student of our literature and of our age, a more wonderful one even than that of the Renaissance, but to lapse from the general regard. That each will for a long time find appreciative readers is certain. They have a fascination for alert minds, and they have not infrequent ramifications which are worth pursuing for the glimpses afforded into an always evanishing Promised Land. "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau" (the name, by the way, is not purely fanciful, being formed from Hohen Schwangau, one of the castles of the late King of Bavaria) is Browning's complement to his wife's "Ode to Napoleon III." "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" is a true story, the narrative of the circumstances pertinent to the tragic death of one Antonio Mellerio, a Paris jeweller, which occurred in 1870 at St. Aubin in Normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. It is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque Zola. It has the fundamental weakness of "The Ring and the Book" — the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. It is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to a masterpiece of fiction.

"Fifine at the Fair", on the other hand, is so powerful and often so beautiful a poem that one would be rash indeed were he, with the blithe critical assurance which is so generally snuffed out like a useless candle by a later generation, to prognosticate its inevitable seclusion from the high place it at present occupies in the estimate of the poet's most uncompromising admirers. But surely equally rash is the assertion that it will be the "poem of the future". However, our concern is not with problematical estimates, but with the poem as it appears to US. It is one of the most characteristic of Browning's productions. It would be impossible for the most indolent reader or critic to attribute it, even if anonymous, to another parentage. Coleridge alludes somewhere to certain verses of Wordsworth's, with the declaration that if he had met them howling in the desert he would have recognised their authorship. "Fifine" would not even have to howl.

Browning was visiting Pornic one autumn, when he saw the gipsy who was the original of "Fifine". In the words of Mrs. Orr, "his fancy was evidently set roaming by the gipsy's audacity, her strength — the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a pathetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person. But he would turn into some one else in the act of working it out — for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow up under his pen."

One drawback to an unconditional enjoyment of Balzac is that every now and again the student of the `Comedie Humaine' resents the too obvious display of the forces that propel the effect — a lesser phase of the weariness which ensues upon much reading of the mere "human documents" of the Goncourt school of novelists. In the same way, we too often see Browning working up the electrical qualities, so that, when the fulmination comes, we understand "just how it was produced," and, as illogically as children before a too elaborate conjurer, conclude that there is not so much in this particular poetic feat as in others which, like Herrick's maids, continually do deceive. To me this is affirmable of "Fifine at the Fair". The poet seems to know so very well what he is doing. If he did not take the reader so much into his confidence, if he would rely more upon the liberal grace of his earlier verse and less upon the trained subtlety of his athletic intellect, the charm would be the greater. The poem would have a surer duration as one of the author's greater achievements, if there were more frequent and more prolonged insistence on the note struck in the lines (Section 73) about the hill-stream, infant of mist and dew, falling over the ledge of the fissured cliff to find its fate in smoke below, as it disappears into the deep, "embittered evermore, to make the sea one drop more big thereby:" or in the cloudy splendour of the description of nightfall (Section 106): or in the windy spring freshness of