Robert Browning Part 19

_Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, published in 1887, Browning's last volume but one, betrays not the slightest decline in his mental vigour. It suffers, however, from the fact that several of the "Parleyings" are discussions--emotional, it is true, as well as intellectual--of somewhat abstract themes, that these discussions are often prolonged beyond what the subject requires, and that the "People of Importance" are in some instances not men and women, but mere sounding-boards to throw out Browning's own voice. When certain aspects or principles of art are considered in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, before us stands Brother Lippo himself, a living, breathing figure, on whom our interest must needs fasten whatever may be the subject of his discourse.

There is of course a propriety in connecting a debate on evil in the world as a means to good with the name of the author of "The Fable of the Bees," there is no impropriety in connecting a study of the philosophy of music with the name of Charles Avison the Newcastle organist; but we do not make acquaintance through the parleyings with either Avison or Mandeville. This objection does not apply to all the poems. The parleying _With Daniel Bartoli_ is a story of love and loss, admirable in its presentation of the heroine and the unheroic hero. We are interested in Francis Furini, "good priest, good man, good painter,"

before he begins to preach his somewhat portentous sermon on evolution.

And in the case of Christopher Smart, the question why once and only once he was a divinely inspired singer is the question which most directly leads to a disclosure of his character as a poet. The volume, however, as a whole, while Browning's energy never flags, has a larger proportion than its predecessors of what he himself terms "mere grey argument"; and, as if to compensate this, it is remarkable for sudden outbursts of imagination and pa.s.sion, as if these repressed for a time had carried away the d.y.k.es and dams, and went on their career in full flood. The description of the glory of sunrise in _Bernard de Mandeville_, the description of the Chapel in _Christopher Smart_, the praise of a woman's beauty in _Francis Furini_, the amazing succession of mythological _tours de force_ in _Gerard de Lairesse_, the delightful picture of the blackcap tugging at his prize, a sc.r.a.p of rag on the garden wall, amid the falling snow of March, in the opening of _Charles Avison_--these are sufficient evidence of the abounding force of Browning's genius as a poet at a date when he had pa.s.sed the three score years and ten by half an added decade. Nor would we willingly forget that magical lyric of life and death, of the tulip beds and the daisied grave-mound--"Dance, yellows and whites and reds"--which closes _Gerard de Lairesse_. Wordsworth's daffodils are hardly a more jocund company than Browning's wind-tossed tulips; he accepts their gladness, and yet the starved gra.s.s and daisies are more to him than these:

Daisies and gra.s.s be my heart's bed-fellows On the mound wind spares and suns.h.i.+ne mellows: Dance you, reds and whites and yellows!

Of failure in intellectual or imaginative force the _Parleyings_ show no symptom. But the vigour of Browning's will did a certain wrong to his other powers. He did not wait, as in early days, for the genuine casual inspirations of pleasure. He made it his task to work out all that was in him. And what comes to a writer of genius is better than what is laboriously sought. We may gather wood for the altar, but the true fire must descend from heaven. The speed and excitement kindled by one's own exertions are very different from the varying stress of a wind that bears one onward without the thump and rattle of the engine-room. It would have been a gain if Browning's indomitable steam-engines had occasionally ceased to ply, and he had been compelled to wait for a propitious breeze.

Philosophy, Love, Poetry, Politics, Painting (the nude, with a discourse concerning evolution), Painting again (the modern _versus_ the mythological in art), Music, and, if we add the epilogue, the Invention of Printing--these are the successive themes of Browning's _Parleyings_, and they are important and interesting themes. Unfortunately the method of discussion is neither sufficiently abstract for the lucid exposition of ideas, nor sufficiently concrete for the pure communication of poetic pleasure. Abstract and concrete meet and take hands or jostle, too much as skeleton and lady might in a _danse Macabre_. The spirit of acquiescence--strenuous not indolent acquiescence--with our intellectual limitations is constantly present. Does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun?

Well, did not Prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service? Is the fire a little thing beside the immensity in the heavens above us?

Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed-- Which, in the large, who sees to bless?

Or again--it is Christopher Smart, who triumphs for once so magnificently in his "Song to David," and fails, with all his contemporaries, in the poetry of ambitious instruction. And why? Because for once he was content with the first step that poetry should take--to confer enjoyment, leaving instruction--the fruit of enjoyment--to come later. True learning teaches through love and delight, not through pretentious didactics,--a truth forgotten by the whole tribe of eighteenth century versifiers. And once more--does Francis Furini paint the naked body in all its beauty? Right! let him study precisely this divine thing the body, before he looks upward; let him retire from the infinite into his proper circ.u.mscription:

Only by looking low, ere looking high, Comes penetration of the mystery.

So also with our view of the mingled good and evil in the world; perhaps to some transcendent vision evil may wholly disappear; perhaps we shall ourselves make this discovery as we look back upon the life on earth.

Meanwhile it is as men that we must see things, and even if evil be an illusion (as Browning trusts), it is a needful illusion in our educational process, since through evil we become aware of good. Thus at every point Browning accepts here, as in _Ferishtah's Fancies_, a limited provisional knowledge as sufficient for our present needs, with a sustaining hope which extends into the future. On the other hand, if your affair is not the sincerity of thought and feeling, but a design to rule the ma.s.s of men for your own advantage, you must act in a different spirit. Do not, in the manner of Bubb Doddington, attempt to impose upon your fellows with the obvious and worn-out pretence that all you do has been undertaken on their behalf and in their interests. There is a newer and a better trick than that. a.s.sume the supernatural; have a "mission "; have a "message"; be earnest, with all the authority of a divine purpose. Play boldly this new card of statesmans.h.i.+p, and you may have from time to time as many inconsistent missions and messages as ambitious statecraft can suggest to you. Through all your gyrations the admiring crowd will still stand agape. Was Browning's irony of a cynical philosophy of statesmans.h.i.+p suggested by his view of the procedure of a politician, whom he had once admired, whose talents he still recognised, but from whom he now turned away with indignant aversion? However this may have been, his poems which touch on politics do not imply that respect for the people thinking, feeling, and moving, in ma.s.ses which is a common profession with the liberal leaders of the platform. Browning's liberalism was a form of his individualism; he, like Shakespeare, had a sympathy with the wants and affections of the humblest human lives; and, like Shakespeare, he thought that foolish or incompetent heads are often conjoined with hearts that in a high degree deserve respect.

_Asolando_, the last volume of a long array, was published in London on the last day of Browning's life. As he lay dying in Venice, telegraphed tidings reached his son of the eager demand for copies made in antic.i.p.ation of its appearance and of the instant and appreciative reviews; Browning heard the report with a quiet gratification. It is happy when praise in departing is justified, and this was the case with a collection of poems which to some readers seemed like a revival of the poetry of its author's best years of early and mid manhood. _Asolando_ is, however, in the main distinctly an autumn gathering, a handful of flowers and fruit belonging to the Indian summer of his genius. The Prologue is a confession, like that of Wordsworth's great Ode, that a glory has pa.s.sed away from the earth. When first he set eyes on Asolo, some fifty years previously, the splendour of Italian landscape seemed that of

Terror with beauty, like the Bush Burning yet unconsumed

Now, while the beauty remains, the flame is extinct--"the Bush is bare."

Browning finds his consolation in the belief that he has come nearer to the realities of earth by discarding fancies, and that his wonder and awe are more wisely directed towards the transcendent G.o.d than towards His creatures. But in truth what the mind confers is a fact and no fancy; the loss of what Browning calls the "soul's iris-bow" is the loss of a substantial, a divine possession. The _Epilogue_ has in it a certain energy, but the thews are those of an old athlete, and through the energy we are conscious of the strain. The speaker pitches his voice high, as if it could not otherwise be heard at a distance. The _Reverie_, a speculation on the time when Power will show itself fully and therefore be known as love, has some of that vigorous intellectual garrulity which had grown on Browning during the years when unhappily for his poetry he came to be regarded chiefly as a prophet and a sage.

An old man rightly values the truths which experience has made real for him; he repeats them again and again, for they const.i.tute the best gift he can offer to his disciples; but his utterances are not always directly inspired; they are sometimes faintly echoed from an earlier inspiration. In the _Reverie_, while accepting our limitations of knowledge, which he can term ignorance in its contrast with the vast unknown, Browning discovers in the moral consciousness of man a prophecy of the ultimate triumph of good over what we think of as evil, a prophecy of the final reconciliation of love with power. And among the laws of life is not merely submission but aspiration:

Life is--to wake not sleep, Rise and not rest, but press From earth's level where blindly creep Things perfected, more or less, To the heaven's height, far and steep, Where amid what strifes and storms May wait the adventurous quest, Power is love.

The voice of the poet of _Paracelsus_ and of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is still audible in this latest of his prophesyings. And therefore he welcomes earth in his _Rephan_, earth, with its whole array of failures and despairs, as the fit training-ground for man. Better its trials and losses and crosses than a sterile uniformity of happiness; better its strife than rest in any golden mean of excellence. Nor are its intellectual errors and illusions without their educational value. It is better, as _Development_, with its recollections of Browning's childhood, a.s.sures us that the boy should believe in Troy siege, and the combats of Hector and Achilles, as veritable facts of history, than bend his brow over Wolfs Prolegomena or perplex his brain with moral philosophies to grapple with which his mind is not yet competent. By and by his illusions will disappear while their gains will remain.

The general impression left by _Asolando_ is that of intellectual and imaginative vigour. The series of _Bad Dreams_ is very striking and original in both pictorial and pa.s.sionate power. _Dubiety_ is a poem of the Indian Summer, but it has the beauty, with a touch of the pathos, proper to the time. The love songs are rather songs of praise than of pa.s.sion, but they are beautiful songs of praise, and that ent.i.tled _Speculative_, which is frankly a poem of old age, has in it the genuine pa.s.sion of memory. _White Witchcraft_ does in truth revive the manner of earlier volumes. The

Infinite pa.s.sion and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn

told of in a poem of 1855 is present, with a touch of humour to guard it from its own excess in the admirable _Inapprehensiveness_. The speaker who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he gallantly accepts his humble role in the tragi-comedy of foiled pa.s.sion:--

"No, the book Which noticed how the wall-growths wave," said she, "Was not by Ruskin."

I said "Vernon Lee."

And in the uttered "Vernon Lee" lies a vast renunciation half comical and wholly tragic. There are jests in the volume, and these, with the exception of _Ponte dell' Angelo_, have the merit of brevity; they buzz swiftly in and out, and do not wind about us with the terror of voluminous coils, as sometimes happens when Browning is in his mood of mirth. There are stories, and they are told with spirit and with skill.

In _Beatrice Signorini_ the story-teller does justice to the honest jealousy of a wife and to the honest love of a husband who returns from the wanderings of his imagination to the frank fidelity of his heart.

Cynicism grows genial in the jest of _The Pope and the Net_. In _Muckle-Mouth Meg_, laughter and kisses, audible from the page, and a woman's art in love-craft, turn tragedy in a hearty piece of comedy.

_The Bean-Feast_ presents us with the latest transformation of the Herakles ideal, where a good Christian Herakles, Pope Sixtus of Rome, makes common cause with his spiritual children in their humble pleasures of the senses. And in contrast with this poem of the religion of joy is the story of another ruler of Rome, the too fortunate Emperor Augustus, who, in the shadow of the religion of fear and sorrow, must propitiate the envy of Fate by turning beggar once a year. A s.h.i.+vering thrill runs through us as we catch a sight of the supreme mendicant's "sparkling eyes beneath their eyebrows' ridge":

"He's G.o.d!" shouts Lucius Varus Rufus: "Man And worms'-meat any moment!" mutters low Some Power, admonis.h.i.+ng the mortal-born.

There were n.o.bler sides of Paganism than this with which Browning seems never to have had an adequate sympathy. And yet the religion even of Marcus Aurelius lacked something of the joy of the religion of the thankful Pope who feasted upon beans.[144]

In the winter which followed his change of abode from Warwick Crescent to the more commodious house in De Vere Gardens, the winter of 1887-1888, Browning's health and strength visibly declined; a succession of exhausting colds lowered his vitality; yet he maintained his habitual ways of life, and would not yield. In August 1888 he started ill for his Italian holiday, and travelled with difficulty and distress. But the rest among the mountains at Primiero restored him. At Venice he seemed as vigorous as he was joyous. And when he returned to London in February 1889 the improvement in his strength was in a considerable measure maintained. Yet it was evident that the physical vigour which had seemed invincible was on the ebb. In the early summer he paid the last of those visits, which he so highly valued, to Balliol College, Oxford.

The opening week of June found him at Cambridge. Mr Gosse has told how on the first Sunday of that month Browning and he sat together "in a sequestered part of the beautiful Fellows' Garden of Trinity," under a cloudless sky, amid the early foliage with double hawthorns in bloom, and how the old man, in a mood of serenity and without his usual gesticulation, talked of his own early life and aspirations. He shrank that summer, says Mrs Orr, from the fatigue of a journey to Italy and thought of Scotland as a place of rest. But unfavourable weather in early August forbade the execution of the plan. An invitation from Mrs Bronson to her house at Asolo, to be followed by the pleasure of seeing his son and his son's wife in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, were attractions not to be resisted, and in company with Miss Browning, he reached the little hill-town that had grown so dear to him without mishap and even without fatigue.

To the early days of July, shortly before his departure for Italy, belong two incidents which may be placed side by side as exhibiting two contrasted sides of Browning's character. On the 5th of that month he dined with the Shah, who begged for the gift of one of his books. Next day he chose a volume the binding of which might, as he says, "take the imperial eye"; but the pleasure of the day was another gift, a gift to a person who was not imperial. "I said to myself," he wrote to his young friend the painter Lehmann's daughter, addressed in the letter as "My beloved Alma"--"I said to myself 'Here do I present my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author's sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?' So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or not, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend, Robert Browning." A gracious bowing of old age over the grace and charm of youth! But the work of two days later, July 8th, was not gracious. The lines "To Edward Fitzgerald," printed in _The Athenaeum_, were dated on that day. It is stated by Mrs Orr that when they were despatched to the journal in which they appeared, Browning regretted the deed, though afterwards he found reasons to justify himself.

Fitzgerald's reference to Mrs Browning caused him a spasm of pain and indignation, nor did the pain for long subside. The expression of his indignation was outrageous in manner, and deficient in real power. He had read a worse meaning into the unhappy words than had been intended, and the writer was dead. Browning's act was like an involuntary muscular contraction, which he could not control. The lines sprang far more from love than from hate. "I felt as if she had died yesterday," he said. We cannot regret that Browning was capable of such an offence; we can only regret that what should have controlled his cry of pain and rage did not operate at the right moment.

In Asolo, beside "the gate," Mrs Bronson had found and partly made what Mr Henry James describes as "one of the quaintest possible little places of _villegiatura_"--La Mura, the house, "resting half upon the dismantled, dissimulated town-wall. No sweeter spot in all the sweetnesses of Italy." Browning's last visit to Asolo was a time of almost unmingled enjoyment. "He seemed possessed," writes Mrs Orr, "by a strange buoyancy, an almost feverish joy in life." The thought that he was in Asolo again, which he had first seen in his twenty-sixth year, and since then had never ceased to remember with affection, was a happy wonder to him. He would stand delighted on the loggia of La Mura, looking out over the plain and identifying the places of historical interest, some of which were connected with his own "Sordello." Nor was the later story forgotten of Queen Caterina Cornaro, whose palace-tower overlooks Asolo, and whose secretary, Cardinal Bembo, wrote _gli Asolani_, from which came the suggestion for the t.i.tle of Browning's forthcoming volume. At times, as Mrs Bronson relates, the beauty of the prospect was enough, with no historical reminiscences, the plain with its moving shadows, the mountain-ranges to the west, and southwards the delicate outline of the Euganean Hills. "I was right," said he, "to fall in love with this place fifty years ago, was I not?"

The procedure of the day at Asolo was almost as regular as that of a London day. The morning walk with his sister, when everything that was notable was noted by his keen eyes, the return, English newspapers, proof-sheets, correspondence, the light mid-day meal, the afternoon drive in Mrs Branson's carriage, tea upon the loggia, the evening with music or reading, or visits to the little theatre--these const.i.tuted an almost unvarying and happy routine. On his walks he delighted to recognise little details of architecture which he had observed in former years; or he would peer into the hedgerows and watch the living creatures that lurked there, or would "whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them."[145] Sometimes a longer drive (and that to Ba.s.sano was his favourite) required an earlier start in the carriage with luncheon at some little inn. "If we were ever late in returning to Asolo," Mrs Bronson writes, "he would say 'Tell Vittorio to drive quickly; we must not lose the sunset from the loggia.' ... Often after a storm, the effects of sun breaking through clouds before its setting, combined with the scenery of plain and mountain, were such as to rouse the poet to the greatest enthusiasm. Heedless of cold or damp, forgetting himself completely, though warmly wrapped to please others, he would gaze on the changing aspects of earth and sky until darkness covered everything from his sight."

When in the evenings Browning read aloud he did not, like Tennyson, as described by Mr Rossetti, allow his voice to "sway onward with a long-drawn chaunt" which gave "n.o.ble value and emphasis to the metrical structure and pauses." His delivery was full and distinctive, but it "took much less account than Tennyson's of the poem as a rhythmical whole; his delivery had more affinity to that of an actor, laying stress on all the light and shade of the composition--its touches of character, the conversational points, its dramatic give-and-take. In those qualities of elocution in which Tennyson was strong, and aimed to be strong, Browning was contentedly weak; and _vice versa_."[146]

Sometimes, like another great poet, Pope, he was deeply affected by the pa.s.sion of beauty or heroism or pathos in what he read, and could not control his feelings. Mrs Orr mentions that in reading aloud his translation of the _Herakles_, he, like Pope in reading a pa.s.sage of his _Iliad_, was moved to tears. Dr Furnivall tells of the mounting excitement with which he once delivered in the writer's hearing his _Ixion_. When at La Mura after his dreamy playing, on a spinet of 1522, old airs, melodious, melancholy airs, Browning would propose to read aloud, it was not his own poetry that he most willingly chose. "No R.B.

to-night," he would say; "then with a smile, 'Let us have some real poetry'"; and the volume would be one by Sh.e.l.ley or Keats, or Coleridge or Tennyson. It was as a punishment to his hostess for the crime of having no Shakespeare on her shelves that he threatened her with one of his "toughest poems"; but the tough poem, interpreted by his emphasis and pauses, became "as clear and comprehensible as one could possibly desire." In his talk at Asolo "he seemed purposely to avoid deep and serious topics. If such were broached in his presence he dismissed them with one strong, convincing sentence, and adroitly turned the current of conversation into a shallower channel."

A project which came very near his heart was that of purchasing from the munic.i.p.al authorities a small piece of ground, divided from La Mura by a ravine clothed with olive and other trees, "on which stood an unfinished building"--the words are Mrs Bronson's--"commanding the finest view in Asolo." He desired much to have a summer or autumn abode to which he might turn with the a.s.surance of rest in what most pleased and suited him. In imagination, with his characteristic eagerness, he had already altered and added to the existing structure, and decided on the size and aspect of the loggia which was to out-rival that of La Mura. "'It shall have a tower,' he said, 'whence I can see Venice at every hour of the day, and I shall call it "Pippa's Tower".... We will throw a rustic bridge across the streamlet in the ravine.'" And then, in a graver mood: "It may not be for me to enjoy it long--who can say? But it will be useful for Pen and his family.... But I am good for ten years yet." And when his son visited Asolo and approved of the project of Pippa's Tower, Browning's happiness in his dream was complete. It was on the night of his death that the authorities of Asolo decided that the purchase might be carried into effect.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE.

_From a drawing by_ Miss KATHERINE KIMBALL.]

For a time during this last visit to Asolo Browning suffered some inconvenience from shortness of breath in climbing hills, but the discomfort pa.s.sed away. He looked forward to an early return to England, spoke with pleasant antic.i.p.ation of the soft-pedal piano which his kind friend Mrs Bronson desired to procure at Boston and place in his study in De Vere Gardens, and he dreamed of future poetical achievements.

"Shall I whisper to you my ambition and my hope?" he asked his hostess.

"It is to write a tragedy better than anything I have done yet. I think of it constantly." With the end of October the happy days at Asolo were at an end. On the first of November he was in Venice, "magnificently lodged," he says, "in this vast palazzo, which my son has really shown himself fit to possess, so surprising are his restorations and improvements." At Asolo he had parted from his American friend Story with the words, "More than forty years of friends.h.i.+p and never a break."

In Venice he met an American friend of more recent years, Professor Corson, who describes him as stepping briskly, with a look that went everywhere, and as cheerfully antic.i.p.ating many more years of productive work.[147] Yet in truth the end was near. Dining with Mr and Mrs Curtis, where he read aloud some poems of his forthcoming volume, he met a London physician, Dr Bird. Next evening Dr Bird again dined with Browning, who expressed confident satisfaction as to his state of health, and held out his wrist that his words might be confirmed by the regularity and vigour of his pulse. The physician became at once aware that Browning's confidence was far from receiving the warrant in which he believed. Still he maintained his customary two hours' walk each day.

Towards the close of November, on a day of fog, he returned from the Lido with symptoms of a bronchial cold. He dealt with the trouble as he was accustomed, and did not take to his bed. Though feeling scarcely fit to travel he planned his departure for England after the lapse of four or five days. On December 1st, an Italian physician was summoned, and immediately perceived the gravity of the case. Within a few days the bronchial trouble was subdued, but failure of the heart was apparent.

Some hours before the end he said to one of his nurses, "I feel much worse. I know now that I must die." The ebbing away of life was painless. As the clocks of Venice were striking ten on the night of Thursday, December 12, 1889, Browning died.[148]

He had never concerned himself much about his place of burial. A lifeless body seemed to him only an old vesture that had been cast aside. "He had said to his sister in the foregoing summer," Mrs Orr tells us, "that he wished to be buried wherever he might die; if in England, with his mother; if in France, with his father; if in Italy, with his wife." The English cemetery in Florence had, however, been closed. The choice seemed to lie between Venice, which was the desire of the city, or, if the difficulties could be overcome by the intervention of Lord Dufferin, the old Florentine cemetery. The matter was decided otherwise; a grave in Westminster Abbey was proposed by Dean Bradley, and the proposal was accepted.[149] A private service took place in the _Palazzo Rezzonico_; the coffin, in compliance with the civic requirements, was conveyed with public honours to the chapel on the island of San Michele; and from thence to the house in De Vere Gardens.

On the last day of the year 1889, in presence of a great and reverent crowd, with solemn music arranged for the words of Mrs Browning's poem, "He giveth his beloved sleep," the body of Browning was laid in its resting-place in Poets' Corner.

To attempt at the present time to determine the place of Browning in the history of English poetry is perhaps premature. Yet the record of "How it strikes a contemporary" may itself have a certain historical interest. When estimates of this kind have been revised by time even their errors are sometimes instructive, or, if not instructive, are amusing. It is probable that Tennyson will remain as the chief representative in poetry of the Victorian period. Browning, who was slower in securing an audience, may be found to possess a more independent individuality. Yet in truth no great writer is independent of the influences of his age.

Browning as a poet had his origins in the romantic school of English poetry; but he came at a time when the romance of external action and adventure had exhausted itself, and when it became necessary to carry romance into the inner world where the adventures are those of the soul.

On the ethical and religious side he sprang from English Puritanism.

Each of these influences was modified by his own genius and by the circ.u.mstances of its development. His keen observation of facts and pa.s.sionate inquisition of human character drew him in the direction of what is termed realism. This combination of realism with romance is even more strikingly seen in an elder contemporary on whose work Browning bestowed an ardent admiration, the novelist Balzac. His Puritanism received important modifications from his wide-ranging artistic instincts and sympathies, and again from the liberality of a wide-ranging intellect. He has the strenuous moral force of Puritanism, but he is wholly free from asceticism, except in the higher significance of that word--the hardy discipline of an athlete. Opinions count for less than the form and the habitual att.i.tudes of a soul. These with Browning were always essentially Christian. He regarded our life on earth as a state of probation and of preparation; sometimes as a battle-field in which our test lies in the choice of the worse or the better side and the energy of devotion to the cause; sometimes as a school of education, in the processes of which the emotions play a larger part than the intellect. The degrees in that school are not to be taken on earth. And on the battle-field the final issue is not to be determined here, so that what appears as defeat may contain within it an a.s.sured promise of ultimate victory. The att.i.tudes of the spirit which were most habitual with him were two--the att.i.tude of aspiration and the att.i.tude of submission. These he brought into harmony with each other by his conception of human life as a period of training for a higher life; we must make the most vigorous and joyous use of our schooling, and yet we must press towards what lies beyond it.

From the romantic poetry of the early years of the nineteenth century comes a cry or a sigh of limitless desire. Under the inspiration of the Revolutionary movement pa.s.sion had broken the bounds of the eighteenth century ideal of balance and moderation. With the transcendental reaction against a mechanical view of the relation of G.o.d to the universe and to humanity the soul had put forth boundless claims and unmeasured aspirations. In his poetic method each writer followed the leadings of his own genius, without reference to common rules and standards; the individualism of the Revolutionary epoch a.s.serted itself to the full. These several influences helped to determine the character of Browning's poetry. But meeting in him the ethical and religious tendencies of English Puritanism they acquired new significances and a.s.sumed new forms. The cry of desire could not turn, as it did with Byron, to cynicism; it must not waste itself, as sometimes happened with Sh.e.l.ley, in the air or the ether. It must be controlled by the will and turned to some spiritual uses. The transcendental feeling which Wordsworth most often attained through an impa.s.sioned contemplation of external nature must rest upon a broader basis and include among its sources or abettors all the higher pa.s.sions of humanity. The Revolutionary individualism must be maintained and extended; in his methods Browning would acknowledge no master; he would please himself and compel his readers to accept his method even if strange or singular.

As for the mediaeval revival, which tried to turn aside, and in part capture, the transcendental tendencies of his time, Browning rejected it, in the old temper of English Puritanism, on the side of religion; but on the side of art it opened certain avenues upon which he eagerly entered. The scientific movement of the nineteenth century influenced him partly as a force to be met and opposed by his militant transcendentalism. Yet he gives definite expression in _Paracelsus_ to an idea of evolution both in nature and in human society, an idea of evolution which is, however, essentially theistic. "All that seems proved in Darwin's scheme," he wrote to Dr Furnivall in 1881, "was a conception familiar to me from the beginning." The positive influences of the scientific age in which he lived upon Browning's work were chiefly these--first it tended to intellectualise his instincts, compelling him to justify them by a definite theory; and secondly it co-operated with his tendency towards realism as a student of the facts of human nature; it urged him towards research in his psychology of the pa.s.sions; it supported him in his curious inquisition of the phenomena of the world of mind.

Being a complete and a sane human creature, Browning could not rest content with the vicious asceticism of the intellect which calls itself scientific because it refuses to recognise any facts that are not material and tangible. Science itself, in the true sense of the word, exists and progresses by ventures of imaginative faith. And in all matters which involve good and evil, hopes and fears, in all matters which determine the conduct of life, no rational person excludes from his view the postulates of our moral nature or should exclude the final option of the will. The person whose beliefs are determined by material facts alone and by the understanding unallied with our other powers is the irrational and unscientific person. Being a complete and sane human creature, Browning was a.s.sured that the visible order of things is part of a larger order, the existence of which alone makes human life intelligible to the reason. The understanding being incapable of arriving unaided at a decision between rival theories of life, and neutrality between these being irrational and illegitimate, he rightly determined the balance with the weight of emotion, and rightly acted upon that decision with all the energy of his will. His chief intellectual error was not that he undervalued the results of the intellect, but that he imagined the existence as a part of sane human nature, of a wholly irrational intellect which in affairs of religious belief and conduct is indifferent to the promptings of the emotions and the moral nature.

Browning's optimism has been erroneously ascribed to his temperament. He declared that in his personal experience the pain of life outweighed its pleasure. He remembered former pain more vividly than he remembered pleasure. His optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find. If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence. That whole of which our life on earth forms a part could not be conceived by Browning as rational without also being conceived as good.

All the parts of Browning's nature were vigorous, and they worked harmoniously together. His senses were keen and alert; his understanding was both penetrating and comprehensive; his pa.s.sions had sudden explosive force and also steadfastness and persistency; his will supported his other powers and perhaps it had too large a share in his later creative work. His feeling for external nature was twofold; he enjoyed colour and form--but especially colour--as a feast for the eye, and returned thanks for his meal as the Pope of his poem did for the bean-feast. This was far removed from that pa.s.sionate spiritual contemplation of nature of the Wordsworthian mood. But now and again for Browning external nature was, not indeed suffused as for Wordsworth, but pierced and shot through with spiritual fire. His chief interest, however, was in man. The study of pa.s.sions in their directness and of the intellect in its tortuous ways were at various times almost equally attractive to him. The emotions which he chiefly cared to interpret were those connected with religion, with art, and with the relations of the s.e.xes.

In his presentation of character Browning was far from exhibiting either the universality or the disinterestedness of Shakespeare. His sympathy with action was defective. The affections arising from hereditary or traditional relations are but slenderly represented in his poetry; the pa.s.sions which elect their own objects are largely represented. Those graceful gaieties arising from a long-established form of society, which const.i.tute so large a part of Shakespeare's comedies, are almost wholly absent from his work. His humour was robust but seldom fine or delicate.

In an age of intellectual and spiritual conflict and trouble, his art was often deflected from the highest ends by his concern on behalf of ideas. He could not rest satisfied, it has been observed, with contemplating the children of his imagination, nor find the fulfilment of his aim in the fact of having given them existence.[150] It seems often as if his purpose in creating them was to make them serve as questioners, objectors, and answerers in the great debate of conflicting thoughts which proceeds throughout his poems. His object in transferring his own consciousness into the consciousness of some imagined personage seems often to be that of gaining a new stand-point from which to see another and a different aspect of the questions concerning which he could not wholly satisfy himself from any single point of view. He cannot be content to leave his men and women, in Shakespeare's disinterested manner, to look in various directions according to whatever chanced to suit best the temper and disposition he had imagined for them. They are placed by him with their eyes turned in very much the same direction, gazing towards the same problems, the same ideas. And somehow Browning himself seems to be in company with them all the time, learning their different reports of the various aspects which those problems or ideas present to each of them, and choosing between the different reports in order to give credence to that which seems true.

The study of no individual character would seem to him of capital value unless that character contained something which should help to throw light upon matters common to all humanity, upon the inquiries either as to what it is, or as to what are its relations to the things outside humanity. This is not quite the highest form of dramatic poetry. There is in it perhaps something of the error of seeking too quick returns of profit, and of drawing "a circle premature," to use Browning's own words, "heedless of far gain." The contents of characters so conceived can be exhausted, whereas when characters are presented with entire disinterestedness they may seem to yield us less at first, but they are inexhaustible. The fault--if it be one--lay partly in Browning's epoch, partly in the nature of his genius. Such a method of deflected dramatic characterisation as his is less appropriate to regular drama than to the monologue; and accordingly the monologue, reflective or lyrical, became the most characteristic instrument of his art.