An Introduction to the Study of Browning Part 9

III.

See the creature stalking While we speak!

Hush and hide the talking, Cheek on cheek!

IV.

What so false as truth is, False to thee?

Where the serpent's tooth is, Shun the tree--

V.

Where the apple reddens Never pry-- Lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.

VI.

Be a G.o.d and hold me With a charm!

Be a man and fold me With thine arm!

VII.

Teach me, only teach, Love!

As I ought I will speak thy speech, Love, Think thy thought--

VIII.

Meet, if thou require it, Both demands, Laying flesh and spirit In thy hands.

IX.

That shall be to-morrow Not to-night: I must bury sorrow Out of sight:

X.

--Must a little weep, Love, (Foolish me!) And so fall asleep, Love, Loved by thee."

_Any Wife to any Husband_ is the grave and mournful lament of a dying woman, addressed to the husband whose love has never wavered throughout her life, but whose faithlessness to her memory she foresees. The situation is novel in poetry, and it is realised with an intense sympathy and depth of feeling. The tone of dignified sadness in the woman's words, never pa.s.sionate or pleading, only confirmed and hopeless, is admirably rendered in the slow and solemn metre, whose firm smoothness and regularity translate into sound the sentiment of the speech. _A Serenade at the Villa_, which expresses a hopeless love from the man's side, has a special picturesqueness, and something more than picturesqueness: nature and life are seen in throbbing sympathy. The little touches of description give one the very sense of the hot thundrous summer night as it "sultrily suspires" in sympathy with the disconsolate lover at his fruitless serenading. I can scarcely doubt that this poem (some of which has been quoted on p. 25 above), was suggested by one of the songs in Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_, a poem on the same subject in the same rare metre:--

"Who is it that this dark night Underneath my window plaineth?

It is one who from thy sight Being, ah! exiled, disdaineth Every other vulgar light."

If Browning's love-poems have any model or antic.i.p.ation in English poetry, it is certainly in the love-songs of Sidney, in what Browning himself has called,

"The silver speech, Of Sidney's self, the starry paladin."

No lover in English poetry has been so much a man as Sidney and Browning.

_Two in the Campagna_ presents a more intricate situation than most of the love-poems. It is the lament of a man, addressed to the woman at his side, whom he loves and by whom he is loved, over the imperfection and innocent inconstancy of his love. The two can never quite grow to one, and he, oppressed by the terrible burden of imperfect sympathies, is for ever seeking, realising, losing, then again seeking the spiritual union still for ever denied. The vague sense of the Roman Campagna is distilled into exquisite words, and through all there sounds the sad and weary undertone of baffled endeavour:--

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

_The Last Ride Together_ is one of those love-poems which I have spoken of as specially n.o.ble and unique, and it is, I think, the n.o.blest and most truly unique of them all. Thought, emotion and melody are mingled in perfect measure: it has the lyrical "cry," and the objectiveness of the drama. The situation, sufficiently indicated in the t.i.tle, is selected with a choice and happy instinct: the very motion of riding is given in the rhythm. Every line throbs with pa.s.sion, or with a fervid meditation which is almost pa.s.sion, and in the last verse, and, still more, in the single line--

"Who knows but the world may end to-night?"

the dramatic intensity strikes as with an electric shock.

_By the Fireside_ though in all its circ.u.mstances purely dramatic and imaginary, rises again and again to the fervour of personal feeling, and we can hardly be wrong in cla.s.sing it, in soul though not in circ.u.mstance, with _One Word More_ and the other sacred poems which enshrine the memory of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But, apart from this suggestion, the poem is a masterpiece of subtle simplicity and picturesqueness. Nothing could be more admirable in themselves than the natural descriptions throughout; but these are never mere isolated descriptions, nor even a mere stationary background: they are fused with the emotion which they both help to form and a.s.sist in revealing.

_One Word More_ (_To E. B. B._) is one of those sacred poems in which, once and again, a great poet has embalmed in immortal words the holiest and deepest emotion of his existence. Here, and here only in the songs consecrated by the husband to the wife, the living love that too soon became a memory is still "a hope, to sing by gladly." _One Word More_ is Browning's answer to the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_. And, just as Mrs. Browning never wrote anything more perfect than the _Sonnets_, so Browning has never written anything more perfect than the answering lyric.

Yet another section of this most richly varied volume consists of poems, narrative and lyrical, dealing in a brief and pregnant way with some special episode or emotion: love, in some instances, but in a less exclusive way than in the love-poems proper. _The Statue and the Bust_ (one of Browning's best narratives) is a romantic and mainly true tale, written in _terza rima_, but in short lines. The story on which it is founded is a Florentine tradition.

"In the piazza of the SS. Annunziata at Florence is an equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand the First, representing him as riding away from the church, with his head turned in the direction of the Riccardi [now Antinori]

Palace, which occupies one corner of the square. Tradition a.s.serts that he loved a lady whom her husband's jealousy kept a prisoner there; and that he avenged his love by placing himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell upon her."[33]

In the poem the lovers agree to fly together, but the flight, postponed for ever, never comes to pa.s.s. Browning characteristically blames them for their sin of "the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin," for their vacillating purpose, their failure in attaining "their life's set end,"

whatever that end might be. Despite the difficulty of the metre, the verse is singularly fresh and musical. In this poem, the first in which Browning has used the _terza rima_, he observes, with only occasional licence, the proper pause at the end of each stanza of three lines. This law, though rarely neglected by Dante, has seldom been observed by the few English poets who have attempted the measure. Neither Byron in the _Prophecy of Dante_, nor Sh.e.l.ley in _The Triumph of Life_, nor Mrs.

Browning in _Casa Guidi Windows_, has done so. In Browning's later poems in this metre, the pause, as if of set purpose, is wholly disregarded.

_How it strikes a Contemporary_ is at once a dramatic monologue and a piece of poetic criticism. Under the Spanish dress, and beneath the humorous treatment, it is easy to see a very distinct, suggestive and individual theory of poetry, and in the poet who "took such cognizance of men and things, ...

"Of all thought, said and acted, then went home And wrote it fully to our Lord the King--"

we have, making full allowance for the imaginary dramatic circ.u.mstances, a very good likeness of a poet of Browning's order. Another poem, "_Transcendentalism_," is a slighter piece of humorous criticism, possibly self-criticism, addressed to one who "speaks" his thoughts instead of "singing" them. Both have a penetrating quality of beauty in familiarity.

_Before_ and _After_, which mean before and after the duel, realise between them a single and striking situation. _Before_ is spoken by a friend of the wronged man; _After_ by the wronged man himself. The latter is not excelled by any poem of Browning's in its terrible conciseness, the intensity of its utterance of stifled pa.s.sion.

"AFTER.

"Take the cloak from his face, and at first Let the corpse do its worst!

"How he lies in his rights of a man!

Death has done all death can.

And, absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike, And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change.

Ha, what avails death to erase His offence, my disgrace?

I would we were boys as of old In the field, by the fold: His outrage, G.o.d's patience, man's scorn, Were so easily borne!

I stand here now, he lies in his place: Cover the face!"

I know of no piece of verse in the language which has more of the quality and hush of awe in it than this little fragment of eighteen lines.

_Instans Tyrannus_[34] (the Threatening Tyrant) recalls by its motive, however unlike it may be as a poem, the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_. The situations are widely different, but the root of each is identical. In both is developed the mood of pa.s.sive or active hate, arising from mere instinctive dislike. But while in the earlier poem the theme is treated with boisterous sardonic humour, it is here embodied in the grave figure of a stern, single-minded, relentless hater, a tyrant in both senses of the term. Another poem, representing an act of will, though here it is love, not hate, that impels, is _Mesmerism_. The intense absorption, the breathless eagerness of the mesmerist, are rendered in a really marvellous way by the breathless and yet measured race of the verses: fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full-stop, or a real pause in sense or sound. The beautiful and significant little poem called _The Patriot: an old Story_, is a narrative and parable at once, and only too credible and convincing as each. _Respectability_ holds in its three stanzas all that is vital and enviable in the real "Bohemia," and is the first of several poems of escape, which culminate in _Fifine at the Fair_. Both here and in another short suggestive poem, _A Light Woman_ (which might be called the fourth act of a tragedy), the situation is outlined like a silhouette. Equally graphic, in the more ordinary sense of the term, is the picturesque and whimsical view of town and country life taken by a frivolous Italian person of quality in the poem named _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_, "a masterpiece of irony and of description,"

as an Italian critic has defined it.

Of the wealth of lyrics and short poems no adequate count can here be made. Yet, I cannot pa.s.s without a word, if only in a word may I indicate, the admirable craftsmans.h.i.+p and playful dexterity of the lines on _A Pretty Woman_; the pathetic feeling and the exquisite and novel music of _Love in a Life and Life in a Love_; the tense emotion, the suppressed and hopeful pa.s.sion, of _In Three Days_, and the sad and haunting song of _In a Year_, with its winding and liquid melody, its mournful and wondering lament over love forgotten; the rich and marvellously modulated music, the glowing colour, the vivid and pa.s.sionate fancy, of _Women and Roses_; the fresh felicity of "_De Gustibus_," with its enthusiasm for Italy scarcely less fervid than the English enthusiasm of the _Home-Thoughts_; the quaint humour and pregnant simplicity of the admirable little parable of _The Twins_; the sympathetic charm and light touch of _Misconceptions_, and the pretty figurative fancy of _My Star_; the strong, sad, suggestive little poem named _One Way of Love_, with its delicately-wrought companion _Another Way of Love_, the former a love-lyric to be cla.s.sed with _The Lost Mistress_ and _The Last Ride Together_; and, finally, the epilogue to the first volume and a late poem in the second: _Memorabilia_, a tribute to Sh.e.l.ley, full of grateful remembrance and admiring love, significant among the few personal utterances of the poet, and the not less lovely poem and only less fervent tribute to Keats, the sumptuous, gorgeous, and sardonic lines on _Popularity_. A careful study or even, one would think, a careless perusal, of but a few of the poems named above, should be enough to show, once and for all, the infinite richness and variety of Browning's melody, and his complete mastery over the most simple and the most intricate lyric measures. As an example of the finest artistic simplicity, rich with restrained pathos and quiet with keen tension of feeling, we may choose the following.

"ONE WAY OF LOVE