An Introduction to the Study of Browning Part 10

I.

All June I bound the rose in sheaves.

Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves And strew them where Pauline may pa.s.s.

She will not turn aside? Alas!

Let them lie. Suppose they die?

The chance was they might take her eye.

II.

How many a month I strove to suit These stubborn fingers to the lute!

To-day I venture all I know.

She will not hear my music? So!

Break the string; fold music's wing: Suppose Pauline had bade me sing?

III.

My whole life long I learned to love.

This hour my utmost art I prove And speak my pa.s.sion--heaven or h.e.l.l?

She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!

Love who may--I still can say, Those who win heaven, blest are they!"

IN A BALCONY.[35]

[Written at Bagni di Lucca, 1853; published in _Men and Women_, above; reprinted in _Poetical Works_, 1863, under a separate heading; _id_., 1889 (Vol. VII. pp. 1-41). Performed at the Browning Society's Third Annual Entertainment, Prince's Hall, Piccadilly, Nov. 28, 1884, and by the English Drama Society at the Victoria Hall, June 8, 1905.]

The dramatic scene of _In a Balcony_ is the last of the works written in dialogue. We have seen, in tracing the course of the plays from _Strafford_ to _A Soul's Tragedy_, how the playwright gave place to the poet; how the stage construction, the brisk and interchanged dialogue of the earlier dramas, gradually and inevitably developed into the more subtle, the more lengthy dialogue, which itself approached more and more nearly to monologue, of the later ones. _In a Balcony_, written eight years later than _A Soul's Tragedy_, has more affinity with it, in form at least, than with any other of the plays. But while the situation there was purely intellectual and moral, it is here pa.s.sionate and highly-wrought, to a degree never before reached, except in the crowning scene of _Pippa Pa.s.ses_. We must go to the greatest among the Elizabethans to exceed that; we must turn to _Le Roi s'amuse_ to equal this.

The situation is, in one sense, extremely subtle; in another, remarkably simple. The action takes place within a few hours, on a balcony at night. Norbert and Constance are two lovers. Norbert is in the service of a certain Queen, to whom he has, by his diplomatic skill and labour, rendered great services. His aim, all the while, though unknown, as he thinks, to her, has been the hope of winning Constance, the Queen's cousin and dependant. He is now about to claim her as his recompense; but Constance, fearing for the result, persuades him, reluctant though he is, to ask in a roundabout way, so as to flatter or touch the Queen. He over-acts his part. The Queen, a heart-starved and now ageing woman, believes that he loves her, and responds to him with the pa.s.sion of a long-thwarted nature. She announces the wonderful news, with more than the ecstasy of a girl, to Constance. Constance resolves to resign her lover, for his good and the Queen's, and, when he appears, she endeavours to make him understand and enter into her plot. But he cannot and will not see it. In the presence of the Queen he declares his love for Constance, and for her alone. The Queen goes out, in white silence. The lovers embrace in new knowledge and fervour of love.

Measured steps are heard within, and we know that the guard is approaching.

Each of the three characters is admirably delineated. Norbert is a fine, strong, solid, n.o.ble character, without subtlety or mixture of motives.

He loves Constance: he knows that his love is returned: he is resolved to win her hand. From first to last he is himself, honest, straightforward, single-minded, pa.s.sionate; presenting the strongest contrast to Constance's feminine over-subtlety. Constance is more, very much more, of a problem: "a character," as Mr. Wedmore has admirably said, "peculiarly wily for goodness, curiously rich in resource for unalloyed and inexperienced virtue." Does her proposal to relinquish Norbert in favour of the Queen show her to have been lacking in love for him? It has been said, on the one hand, that her act was "n.o.ble and magnanimous," on the other hand, that the act proved her nature to be "radically insincere and inconstant." Probably the truth lies between these two extremes. Her love, we cannot doubt, was true and intense up to the measure of her capacity; but her nature was, instinctively, less outspoken and truthful than Norbert's, more subtle, more reasoning. At the critical moment she is seized by a whirl of emotions, and, with very feminine but singularly unloverlike instinct, she resolves, as she would phrase it, to sacrifice _herself_, not seeing that she is insulting her lover by the very notion of his accepting such a sacrifice. Her character has not the pure and steadfast n.o.bility of Norbert's, but it has the capacity of devotion, and it is genuinely human. The Queen, unlike Constance, but like Norbert, is simple and single in nature. She is a tragic and intense figure, at once pathetic and terrible. I am not aware that the peculiarly pregnant motive: the hidden longing for love in a starved and stunted nature, clogged with restrictions of state and ceremony, hara.s.sed and hampered by circ.u.mstances and by the weight of advancing years; the pa.s.sionate longing suddenly met, as it seems, with reward, and breaking out into a great flame of love and ardour, only to be rudely and finally quenched: I am not aware that this motive has ever elsewhere been worked out in dramatic poetry. As here developed, it is among the great situations in literature.

The verse in which this little tragedy is written has, perhaps, more flexibility than that of any of the formal dramas. It has a strong and fine harmony, a weight and measure, and above all that pungent naturalness which belongs to the period of _Andrea del Sarto_ and the other great monologues.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 29: The picture which Lippo promises to paint (ll. 347-389) is an exact description of his _Coronation of the Virgin_, in the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Florence.]

[Footnote 30: Mrs Foster's translation (Bohn).]

[Footnote 31: Balda.s.sarre Galuppi, surnamed Buranello (1706-1785), was a Venetian composer of some distinction. "He was an immensely prolific composer," says Vernon Lee, "and abounded in melody, tender, pathetic, brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."--_Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_, p. 101.]

[Footnote 32: _Handbook_, p. 266. The poem was written at Paris, January 3, 1852.]

[Footnote 33: Mrs Orr, _Handbook_, p. 201.]

[Footnote 34: The poem was suggested by the opening of the third ode of the third Book of Horace: "Justum et tenacem propositi virum."]

[Footnote 35: It will be more convenient to treat _In a Balcony_ in a separate section than under the general heading of _Men and Women_, for it is, to all intents and purposes, an independent work of another order.]

16. DRAMATIS PERSONae.

[Published in 1864 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. VII., pp.

43-255).]

_Dramatis Personae_, like _Men and Women_ (which it followed after an interval of nine years) is a collection of dramatic monologues, in each of which it is attempted to delineate a single character or a single mood by setting the "imaginary person" in some revealing situation. Of the two possible methods, speech and soliloquy, Browning for the most part prefers the former. In _Dramatis Personae_, however, he recurs, rather more frequently than usual, to the latter; and the situations imaged are usually suggestive rather than explicit, more incomplete and indirect than those in the _Men and Women_. As an ingenious critic said, shortly after the volume was published, "Mr Browning lets us overhear a part of the drama, generally a soliloquy, and we must infer the rest.

Had he to give the story of _Hamlet_, he would probably embody it in three stanzas, the first beginning, 'O that this too too solid flesh would melt!' the second 'To be or not to be, that is the question;' and the third, 'Look here upon this picture, and on that!' From these disjointed utterances the reader would have to construct the story."

Here our critic's clever ingenuity carries him a little too far; but there is some truth in his definition or description of the special manner which characterises such poems as _Too Late_, or _The Worst of It_. But not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the style and versification, have undergone a change during the long-silent years which lie between _Men and Women_ and _Dramatis Personae_. The first note of change, of the change which makes us speak of earlier and later work, is here sounded. From 1833 up to 1855 forms a single period of steady development, of gradual and unswerving ascent.

_Dramatis Personae_ stands on the border line between this period and another, the "later period," which more decisively begins with _The Ring and the Book_. Still, the first note of divergence is certainly sounded here. I might point to the profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness of workmans.h.i.+p; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than of mediaeval and foreign life.

The larger part of the volume consists of dramatic monologues. Three only are in blank verse; the greater number in varied lyric measures.

The first of these, and the longest, _James Lee_, as it was first called, _James Lee's Wife_[36] as it is now more appropriately named, is a _Lieder Kreis_, or cycle of songs, nine in number, which reveal, in "tragic hints," not by means of a connected narrative, the history of an unhappy marriage. There is nothing in it of heroic action or suffering; it is one of those old stories always new which are always tragic to one at least of the actors in them, and which may be tragic or trivial in record, according as the artist is able to mould his material. Each of the sections shows us a mood, signalized by some slight link of circ.u.mstance which may the better enable us to grasp it. The development of disillusion, the melancholy progress of change, is finely indicated in the successive stages of this lyric sequence, from the first clear strain of believing love (shaken already by a faint tremor of fear), through gradual alienation and inevitable severance, to the final resolved parting. This poem is worthy of notice as the only one in which Browning has employed the sequence form; almost the only instance, indeed, in which he has structurally varied his metre in the course of a poem.

_James Lee's Wife_ is written in the form of soliloquy, or reflection.

In two other poems, closely allied to it in sentiment, _The Worst of it_ and _Too Late_, intense feeling expresses itself, though in solitude, as if the object of emotion were present; each is, in great part, a mental appeal to some one loved and lost. In _James Lee's Wife_ a woman was the speaker, and the burden of her lament was mere estrangement. _The Worst of it_ and _Too Late_ are both spoken by men. The former is the utterance of a man whose wife has been false to him; the latter of a man whose loved one is dead. But in each case the situation is further complicated. The woman over whose loss of virtue her forsaken husband mourns with pa.s.sionate anguish and unavailing bitterness of regret, has been to him, whom she now leaves for another, an image of purity: her love and influence have lifted him from the mire, and "the Worst of it,"

the last pang which he cannot nerve himself to endure, is the knowledge that she had saved him, and, partly at least through him, ruined herself. The poem is one of the most pa.s.sionate and direct of Browning's dramatic lyrics: it is thrillingly intense and alive; and the swift force and tremulous eagerness of its very original rhythm and metre translate its sense into sound with perfect fitness. Similar in cadence, though different in arrangement, is the measure of _Too Late_, with its singularly constructed stanza of two quatrains, followed respectively by two couplets, which together made another quatrain. It is worth noticing how admirably and uniformly Browning contrives to connect, in sound, the two halves of the broken quatrains, placing them so as to complete each other, and relieve our ear of the sense of distance. The poem is spoken by a lover who was neither rejected nor accepted: like the lover of Evelyn Hope, he never told his love. His Edith married another, a heartless and soulless lay-figure of a poet (or so at least his rival regards him), and now she is dead. His vague but vivid hopes of some future chance to love her and be loved; the dull rebellion of rashly reasoning sorrow; the remembrance, the repentance, the regret; are all poured out with pathetic naturalness.

These three poems are soliloquies; _Dis aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours_, a poem closely akin in sentiment and style, recurs to the more frequent and perhaps preferable manner of speech to an imagined listener. It is written in that favourite stanza of five lines, on which Browning has played so many variations: here, perhaps, in the internal rhyme so oddly placed, the newest and most ingenious of all. The sentiment and situation are the exact complement or contrast of those expressed in _By the Fireside_. There, fate and nature have brought to a crisis the latent love of two persons: the opportunity is seized, and the crown of life obtained. Here, in circ.u.mstances singularly similar, the vital moment is let slip, the tide is _not_ taken at the turn. And ten years afterwards, when the famous poet and the girl whom he all but let himself love, meet in a Paris drawing-room, and one of them tells the old tale over for the instruction of both, she can point out, with bitter earnestness and irony (and a perfect little touch of feminine nature) his fatal mistake.

_Youth and Art_ is a slighter and more humorous sketch, with a somewhat similar moral. It has wise humour, sharp characterisation, and ballad-like simplicity. Still more perfect a poem, still more subtle, still more Heinesque, if it were not better than Heine, is the little piece called _Confessions_. The pathetic, humorous, rambling s.n.a.t.c.h of final memory in the dying man, addressed, by a delightful irony, to the attendant clergyman, has a sort of grim ecstasy, and the end is one of the most triumphant things in this kind of poetry.

"CONFESSIONS.

I.

What is he buzzing in my ears?

'Now that I come to die.

Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'

Ah, reverend sir, not I!

II.

What I viewed there once, what I view again Where the physic bottles stand On the table's edge,--is a suburb lane, With a wall to my bedside hand.

III.

That lane sloped, much as the bottles do, From a house you could descry O'er the garden wall; is the curtain blue Or green to a healthy eye?

IV.

To mine, it serves for the old June weather Blue above lane and wall; And that farthest bottle labelled 'Ether'

Is the house o'er-topping all.

V.

At a terrace, somewhat near the stopper, There watched for me, one June, A girl: I know, sir, it's improper, My poor mind's out of tune.