Studies in Literature Part 8

Many persons agree that they find it too long, and if they find it so, then for them it is too long. Others, who cannot resist the critic's temptation of believing that a remark must be true if it only look acute and specific, vow that the disclosure in the first volume of the whole plan and plot vitiates subsequent artistic merit. If one cannot enjoy what comes, for knowing beforehand what is coming, this objection may be allowed to have a root in human nature; but then two things might perhaps be urged on the other side,--first, that the interest of the poem lies in the development and presentation of character, on the one hand, and in the many sides which a single transaction offered to as many minds, on the other; and therefore that this true interest could not be marred by the bare statement what the transaction was or, baldly looked at, seemed to be; and, second, that the poem was meant to find its reader in a mood of mental repose, ready to receive the poet's impressions, undisturbed by any agitating curiosity as to plot or final outcome. A more valid accusation touches the many verbal perversities, in which a poet has less right than another to indulge. The compound Latin and English of Don Giacinto, notwithstanding the fan of the piece, still grows a burden to the flesh. Then there are harsh and formless lines, bursts of metrical chaos, from which a writer's dignity and self-respect ought surely to be enough to preserve him. Again, there are pa.s.sages marked by a coa.r.s.e violence of expression that is nothing short of barbarous (for instance, ii. 190, or 245). The only thing to be said is, that the countrymen of Shakespeare have had to learn to forgive uncouth outrages on form and beauty to fine creative genius. If only one could be sure that readers, unschooled as too many are to love the simple and elevated beauty of such form as Sophocles or as Corneille gives, would not think the worst fault the chief virtue, and confound the poet's bluntnesses with his admirable originality. It is certain that in Shakespeare's case his defects are constantly fastened upon, by critics who have never seriously studied the forms of dramatic art except in the literature of England, and extolled as instances of his characteristic mightiness. It may well be, therefore, that the grotesque caprices which Mr. Browning unfortunately permits to himself may find misguided admirers, or, what is worse, even imitators. It would be most unjust, however, while making due mention of these things, to pa.s.s over the dignity and splendour of the verse in many places, where the intensity of the writer's mood finds worthy embodiment in a sustained gravity and vigour and finish of diction not to be surpa.s.sed. The concluding lines of the _Caponsacchi_ (comprising the last page of the second volume), the appeal of the Greek poet in _The Pope_, one or two pa.s.sages in the first _Guido_ (e.g. vol. ii., p. 156, from line 1957), and the close of the _Pompilia_, ought to be referred to when one wishes to know what power over the instrument of his art Mr. Browning might have achieved, if he had chosen to discipline himself in instrumentation.

When all is said that can be said about the violences which from time to time invade the poem, it remains true that the complete work affects the reader most powerfully with that wide unity of impression which it is the highest aim of dramatic art, and perhaps of all art, to produce. After we have listened to all the whimsical dogmatising about beauty, to all the odious cant about morbid anatomy, to all the well-deserved reproach for unpardonable perversities of phrase and outrages on rhythm, there is left to us the consciousness that a striking human transaction has been seized by a vigorous and profound imagination, that its many diverse threads have been wrought into a single, rich, and many-coloured web of art, in which we may see traced for us the labyrinths of pa.s.sion and indifference, stupidity and craft, prejudice and chance, along which truth and justice have to find a devious and doubtful way. The transaction itself, lurid and fuliginous, is secondary to the manner of its handling and presentment. We do not derive our sense of unity from the singleness and completeness of the horrid tragedy, so much as from the power with which its own circ.u.mstances as they happened, the rumours which cl.u.s.tered about it from the minds of men without, the many moods, fancies, dispositions, which it for the moment brought out into light, playing round the fact, the half-sportive flights with which lawyers, judges, quidnuncs of the street, darted at conviction and s.n.a.t.c.hed hap-hazard at truth, are all wrought together into one self-sufficient and compacted shape.

But this shape is not beautiful, and the end of art is beauty? Verbal fanaticism is always perplexing, and, rubbing my eyes, I ask whether that beauty means anything more than such an arrangement and disposition of the parts of the work as, first kindling a great variety of dispersed emotions and thoughts in the mind of the spectator, finally concentrates them in a single mood of joyous, sad, meditative, or interested delight. The sculptor, the painter, and the musician, have each their special means of producing this final and superlative impression; each is bound by the strictly limited capability in one direction and another of the medium in which he works. In poetry it is because they do not perceive how much more manifold and varied are the means of reaching the end than in the other expressions of art, that people insist each upon some particular quiddity which, entering into composition, alone const.i.tutes it genuinely poetic, beautiful, or artistic. Pressing for definition, you never get much further than that each given quiddity means a certain Whatness. This is why poetical criticism is usually so little catholic. A man remembers that a poem in one style has filled him with consciousness of beauty and delight. Why conclude that this style const.i.tutes the one access to the same impression? Why not rather perceive that, to take contemporaries, the beauty of _Thyrsis_ Is mainly produced by a fine suffusion of delicately-toned emotion; that of _Atalanta_ by splendid and barely rivalled music of verse; of _In Memoriam_ by its ordered and harmonious presentation of a sacred mood; of the _Spanish Gypsy_, in the parts where it reaches beauty, by a sublime ethical pa.s.sion; of the _Earthly Paradise_, by sweet and simple reproduction of the spirit of the younger-hearted times? There are poems by Mr. Browning in which it is difficult, or, let us frankly say, impossible, for most of us at all events and as yet, to discover the beauty or the shape. But if beauty may not be denied to a work which, abounding in many-coloured scenes and diverse characters, in vivid image and portraiture, wide reflection and multiform emotion, does further, by a broad thread of thought running under all, bind these impressions into one supreme and elevated conviction, then a.s.suredly, whatever we may think of this pa.s.sage or that, that episode or the other, the first volume or the third, we cannot deny that _The Ring and the Book_, in its perfection and integrity, fully satisfies the conditions of artistic triumph. Are we to ignore the grandeur of a colossal statue, and the n.o.bility of the human conceptions which it embodies, because here and there we notice a flaw in the marble, a blemish in its colour, a jagged slip of the chisel? "It is not force of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts in a face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of high sensibilities."

Then, it is asked by persons of another and still more rigorous temper, whether, as the world goes, the subject, or its treatment either, justifies us in reading some twenty-one thousand and seventy-five lines, which do not seem to have any direct tendency to make us better or to improve mankind. This objection is an old enemy with a new face, and need not detain us, though perhaps the crude and incessant application of a narrow moral standard, thoroughly misunderstood, is one of the intellectual dangers of our time. You may now and again hear a man of really masculine character confess that though he loves Shakespeare and takes habitual delight in his works, he cannot see that he was a particularly moral writer. That is to say, Shakespeare is never directly didactic; you can no more get a system of morals out of his writings than you can get such a system out of the writings of the ever-searching Plato. But, if we must be quant.i.tative, one great creative poet probably exerts a n.o.bler, deeper, more permanent ethical influence than a dozen generations of professed moral teachers. It is a commonplace to the wise, and an everlasting puzzle to the foolish, that direct inculcation of morals should invariably prove so powerless an instrument, so futile a method. The truth is that nothing can be more powerfully efficacious from the moral point of view than the exercise of an exalted creative art, stirring within the intelligence of the spectator active thought and curiosity about many types of character and many changeful issues of conduct and fortune, at once enlarging and elevating the range of his reflections on mankind, ever kindling his sympathies into the warm and continuous glow which purifies and strengthens nature, and fills men with that love of humanity which is the best inspirer of virtue.

Is not this why music, too, is to be counted supreme among moral agents, soothing disorderly pa.s.sion by diving down into the hidden deeps of character where there is no disorder, and touching the diviner mind? Given a certain rect.i.tude as well as vigour of intelligence, then whatever stimulates the fancy, expands the imagination, enlivens meditation upon the great human drama, is essentially moral. Shakespeare does all this, as if sent Iris-like from the immortal G.o.ds, and _The Ring and the Book_ has a measure of the same incomparable quality.

A profound and moving irony subsists in the very structure of the poem. Any other human transaction that ever was, tragic or comic or plain prosaic, may be looked at in a like spirit, As the world's talk bubbled around the dumb anguish of Pompilia, or the cruelty and hate of Guido, so it does around the hourly tragedies of all times and places.

"The instinctive theorizing whence a fact Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look."-- "Vibrations in the general mind At depth of deed already out of reach."-- "Live fact deadened down, Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away:"--

if we reflect that these are the conditions which have marked the formation of all the judgments that we hold by, and which are vivid in operation and effect at this hour, the deep irony and the impressive meaning of the poem are both obvious:--

"So learn one lesson hence Of many which whatever lives should teach, This lesson that our human speech is naught, Our human testimony false, our fame And human estimation words and wind" (iv. 234).

It is characteristic of Mr. Browning that he thus casts the moral of his piece in an essentially intellectual rather than an emotional form, appealing to hard judgment rather than to imaginative sensibility. Another living poet of original genius, of whom we have much right to complain that he gives us so little, ends a poem in two or three lines which are worth quoting here for the ill.u.s.tration they afford of what has just been said about Mr. Browning:--

"Ah, what dusty answer gets the soul, When hot for certainties in this our life!-- In tragic hints here see what evermore Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin line upon the sh.o.r.e?"[1]

[Footnote 1: Mr. George Meredith's _Modern Love_.]

This is imaginative and sympathetic in thought as well as expression, and the truth and the image enter the writer's mind together, the one by the other. The lines convey poetic sentiment rather than reasoned truth; while Mr. Browning's close would be no unfit epilogue to a scientific essay on history, or a treatise on the errors of the human understanding and the inaccuracy of human opinion and judgment. This is the common note of his highest work; hard thought and reason ill.u.s.trating themselves in dramatic circ.u.mstance, and the thought and reason are not wholly fused, they exist apart and irradiate with far-shooting beams the moral confusion of the tragedy. This is, at any rate, emphatically true of _The Ring and the Book_. The fulness and variety of creation, the amplitude of the play and s.h.i.+fting of characters and motive and mood, are absolutely unforced, absolutely uninterfered with by the artificial exigencies of ethical or philosophic purpose. There is the purpose, full-grown, clear in outline, unmistakeable in significance. But the just proprieties of place and season are rigorously observed, because Mr. Browning, like every other poet of his quality, has exuberant and adequate delight in mere creation, simple presentment, and returns to bethink him of the meaning of it all only by-and-by. The pictures of Guido, of Pompilia, of Caponsacchi, of Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, of Pope Innocent, are each of them full and adequate, as conceptions of character in active manifestation apart from the truth which the whole composition is meant to ill.u.s.trate, and which clothes itself in this most excellent drama.

The scientific att.i.tude of the intelligence is almost as markedly visible in Mr. Browning as the strength of his creative power. The lesson of _The Ring and the Book_ is perhaps as nearly positive as anything poetic can be. It is true that ultimately the drama ends in a vindication of what are called the ways of G.o.d to man, if indeed people are willing to put themselves off with a form of omnipotent justice which is simply a partial retribution inflicted on the monster, while torture and butchery fall upon victims more or less absolutely blameless. As if the fact of punishment at length overtaking the guilty Franceschini were any vindication of the justice of that a.s.sumed Providence, which had for so long a time awarded punishment far more harsh to the innocent Pompilia. So far as you can be content with the vindication of a justice of this less than equivocal quality, the sight of the monster brought to the

"Close fetid cell, Where the hot vapour of an agony, Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down Horrible worms made out of sweat and tears,"--

may in a sense prove satisfactory enough. But a man must be very dull who in reading the poem does not perceive that the very spirit of it points to the thousand hazards which even this fragment of justice had to run in saving itself, and bringing about such partially righteous consummation as destiny permits. True opinion fares yet more perilously. _Half-Rome_, the _Other Half-Rome_, the _Tertium Quid_, which is perhaps most masterly and finished of the three, show us how ill truth sifts itself, to how many it never comes at all, how blurred, confused, next door to false, it is figured even to those who seize it by the hem of the garment. We may, perhaps, yawn over the intermingled Latin and law of Arcangeli, in spite of the humour of parts of it, as well as over the vapid floweriness of his rival; but for all that, we are touched keenly by the irony of the methods by which the two professional truth-sifters darken counsel with words, and make skilful sport of life and fact. The whole poem is a parable of the feeble and half-hopeless struggle which truth has to make against the ways of the world. That in this particular case truth and justice did win some pale sort of victory does not weaken the force of the lesson. The victory was such and so won as to stir in us awful thoughts of fatal risks and certain defeats, of falsehood a thousand times clasped for truth, of fact a thousand times banished for fancy:--

"Because Pompilia's purity prevails, Conclude you, all truth triumphs in the end?

So might those old inhabitants of the ark, Witnessing haply their dove's safe return, p.r.o.nounce there was no danger all the while O' the deluge, to the creature's counterparts, Aught that beat wing i' the world, was white or soft, And that the lark, the thrush, the culver too, Might equally have traversed air, found earth, And brought back olive-branch In unharmed bill.

Methinks I hear the Patriarch's warning voice-- 'Though this one breast, by miracle, return, No wave rolls by, in all the waste, but bears Within it some dead dove-like thing as dear, Beauty made blank and harmlessness destroyed!'"

(iv. 218).

Or, to take another simile from the same magnificent pa.s.sage, in which the fine dignity of the verse fitly matches the deep truth of the preacher's monitions:--

"Romans! An elder race possessed your land Long ago, and a false faith lingered still, As shades do, though the morning-star be out.

Doubtless, some pagan of the twilight day Has often pointed to a cavern-mouth, Obnoxious to beholders, hard by Rome, And said,--nor he a bad man, no, nor fool,-- Only a man, so, blind like all his mates,-- 'Here skulk in safety, lurk, defying law, The devotees to execrable creed, Adoring--with what culture ... Jove, avert Thy vengeance from us wors.h.i.+ppers of thee!...

What rites obscene--their idol-G.o.d, an a.s.s!'

So went the word forth, so acceptance found, So century re-echoed century, Cursed the accursed,--and so, from sire to son, You Romans cried, 'The offscourings of our race Corrupt within the depths there: fitly, fiends Perform a temple-service o'er the dead: Child, gather garment round thee, pa.s.s nor pry!'

So groaned your generations: till the time Grew ripe, and lightning hath revealed, belike,-- Thro' crevice peeped into by curious fear,-- Some object even fear could recognise I' the place of spectres; on the illumined wall, To-wit, some nook, tradition talks about, Narrow and short, a corpse's length, no more: And by it, in the due receptacle, The little rude brown lamp of earthenware, The cruse, was meant for flowers, but held the blood, The rough-scratched palm-branch, and the legend left _Pro Christo_. Then the mystery lay clear: The abhorred one was a martyr all the time, A saint whereof earth was not worthy. What?

Do you continue in the old belief?

Where blackness bides unbroke, must devils be?

Is it so certain, not another cell O' the myriad that make up the catacomb, Contains some saint a second flash would show?

Will you ascend into the light of day And, having recognised a martyr's shrine, Go join the votaries that gape around Each vulgar G.o.d that awes the market-place?"

(iv. 219).

With less impetuosity and a more weightily reasoned argument the Pope confronts the long perplexity and entanglement of circ.u.mstances with the fatuous optimism which insists that somehow justice and virtue do rule in the world. Consider all the doings at Arezzo, before and after the consummation of the tragedy. What of the Aretine archbishop, to whom Pompilia cried "Protect me from the fiend!"--

"No, for thy Guido is one heady, strong, Dangerous to disquiet; let him bide!

He needs some bone to mumble, help amuse The darkness of his den with; so, the fawn Which limps up bleeding to my foot and lies, --Come to me, daughter,--thus I throw him back!"

Then the monk to whom she went, imploring him to write to Rome:--

"He meets the first cold sprinkle of the world And shudders to the marrow, 'Save this child?

Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop here!

Who was it dared lay hand upon the ark His betters saw fall nor put finger forth?'"

Worst of all, the Convent of the Convert.i.tes, women to whom she was consigned for help,

"They do help; they are prompt to testify To her pure life and saintly dying days.

She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich!

What does the body that lives through helpfulness To women for Christ's sake? The kiss turns bite, The dove's note changes to the crow's cry: judge!

'Seeing that this our Convent claims of right What goods belong to those we succour, be The same proved women of dishonest life,-- And seeing that this Trial made appear Pompilia was in such predicament,-- The Convent hereupon pretends to said Succession of Pompilia, issues writ, And takes possession by the Fisc's advice.'

Such is their attestation to the cause Of Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped: But, is a t.i.tle-deed to filch, a corpse To slander, and an infant-heir to cheat?

Christ must give up his gains then! They unsay All the fine speeches,--who was saint is wh.o.r.e."

It is not wonderful if his review of all the mean and dolorous circ.u.mstance of this cycle of wrong brings the Pope face to face with the unconquerable problem for the Christian believer, the keystone of the grim arch of religious doubt and despair, through which the courageous soul must needs pa.s.s to creeds of reason and life. Where is "the gloriously decisive change, the immeasurable metamorphosis" in human worth that should in some sort justify the consummate price that had been paid for man these seventeen hundred years before?

"Had a mere adept of the Rosy Cross Spent his life to consummate the Great Work, Would not we start to see the stuff it touched Yield not a grain more than the vulgar got By the old smelting-process years ago?

If this were sad to see in just the sage Who should profess so much, perform no more, What is it when suspected in that Power Who undertook to make and made the world, Devised and did effect man, body and soul, Ordained salvation for them both, and yet ...

Well, is the thing we see, salvation?"

It is certain that by whatever other deficiencies it may be marked _The Ring and the Book_ is blameless for the most characteristic of all the shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous sterility of thought. And why? Because sterility of thought is the blight struck into the minds of men by timorous and halt-footed scepticism, by a half-hearted dread of what chill thing the truth might prove itself, by unmanly reluctance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty of poetic vision over the whole field; and because Mr. Browning's intelligence, on the other hand, is masculine and courageous, moving cheerfully on the solid earth of an articulate and defined conviction, and careful not to omit realities from the conception of the great drama, merely for being unsightly to the too fastidious eye, or jarring in the ear, or too bitterly perplexing to faith or understanding. It is this resolute feeling after and grip of fact which is at the root of his distinguis.h.i.+ng fruitfulness of thought, and it is exuberance of thought, spontaneous, well-marked, and sapid, that keeps him out of poetical preaching, on the one hand, and mere making of music, on the other. Regret as we may the fantastic rudeness and unscrupulous barbarisms into which Mr. Browning's art too often falls, and find what fault we may with his method, let us ever remember how much he has to say, and how effectively he communicates the shock of new thought which was first imparted to him by the vivid conception of a large and far-reaching story. The value of the thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests; but still the thought has poetic value, too, for it is this which has stirred in the writer that keen yet impersonal interest in the actors of his story and in its situations which is one of the most certain notes of true dramatic feeling, and which therefore gives the most unfailing stimulus to the interest of the appreciative reader.

At first sight _The Ring and the Book_ appears to be absolutely wanting in that grandeur which, in a composition of such enormous length, criticism must p.r.o.nounce to be a fundamental and indispensable element.

In an ordinary way this effect of grandeur is produced either by some heroic action surrounded by circ.u.mstances of worthy stateliness, as in the finest of the Greek plays; or as in _Paradise Lost_ by the presence of personages of majestic sublimity of bearing and a.s.sociation; or as in _Faust_ or _Hamlet_ by the stupendous moral abysses which the poet discloses fitfully on this side and that. None of these things are to be found in _The Ring and the Book_ The action of Caponsacchi, though n.o.ble and disinterested, is hardly heroic in the highest dramatic sense, for it is not much more than the lofty defiance of a conventionality, the contemplated penalty being only small; not, for example, as if life or ascertained happiness had been the fixed or even probable price of his magnanimous enterprise. There was no marching to the stake, no deliberate encountering of the mightier risks, no voluntary submission to a lifelong endurance. True, this came in the end, but it was an end unforeseen, and one, therefore, not to be a.s.sociated with the first conception of the original act. Besides, Guido is so saturated with hateful and ign.o.ble motive as to fill the surrounding air with influences that preclude heroic a.s.sociation. It has been said of the great men to whom the Byzantine Empire once or twice gave birth, that even their fame has a curiously tarnished air, as if that too had been touched by the evil breath of the times. And in like manner we may say of Guido Franceschini that even to have touched him in the way of resistance detracts from pure heroism. Perhaps the same consideration explains the comparative disappointment which most people seem to have felt with _Pompilia_ in the third volume. Again, there is nothing which can be rightly called majesty of character visible in one personage or another. There is high devotion in Caponsacchi, a large-minded and free sagacity in Pope Innocent, and around Pompilia the tragic pathos of an incurable woe, which by its intensity might raise her to grandeur if it sprang from some more solemn source than the mere malignity and baseness of an unworthy oppressor. Lastly, there is nothing in _The Ring and the Book_ of that "certain incommensurableness" which Goethe found in his own _Faust_. The poem is kept closely concrete and strictly commensurable by the very framework of its story:--

"pure crude fact, Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard, And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since."

It moves from none of the supernatural agencies which give the impulse to our interest in _Faust_, nor from the sublimer pa.s.sions and yearning after things unspeakable alike in _Faust_ and in _Hamlet._

Yet, notwithstanding its lack of the accustomed elements of grandeur, there is a profound impressiveness about _The Ring and the Book_ which must arise from the presence of some other fine compensating or equivalent quality. Perhaps one may say that this equivalent for grandeur is a certain simple touching of our sense of human kins.h.i.+p, of the large ident.i.ty of the conditions of the human lot, of the piteous fatalities which bring the lives of the great mult.i.tude of men to be little more than "grains of sand to be blown by the wind." This old woe, the poet says, now in the fulness of the days again lives,

"_If precious be the soul of man to man_."

This is the deeply implanted sentiment to which his poem makes successful appeal. Nor is it mocked by mere outpouring of scorn on the blind and fortuitous groping of men and societies of men after truth and justice and traces of the watchfulness of "the unlidded eye of G.o.d." Rather it is this inability to see beyond the facts of our condition to some diviner, ever-present law, which helps to knit us to our kind, our brethren "whom we have seen."

"Clouds obscure-- But for which obscuration all were bright?

Too hastily concluded! Sun-suffused, A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,-- Better the very clarity of heaven: The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear.

What but the weakness in a faith supplies The incentive to humanity, no strength Absolute, irresistible, comports?

How can man love but what he yearns to help And that which men think weakness within strength But angels know for strength and stronger get-- What were it else but the first things made new, But repet.i.tion of the miracle, The divine instance of self-sacrifice That never ends and aye begins for man?"

MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS.