Chapter VII: Introduction (4)

Many readers, especially those who take an intellectual attitude toward all things, in the heavens above and in the earth beneath, suppose that they are prepared to understand almost anything which is understandable if it is only PUT right. This is a most egregious mistake, especially in respect to the subtle and complex spiritual experiences which the more deeply subjective poetry embodies. What De Quincey says in his paper on Kant,* of the comprehension of the higher philosophical truths, can, with still better reason, be said of the responsiveness to the higher spiritual truths: “No complex or very important truth was ever yet transferred in full development from one mind to another: truth of that character is not a piece of furniture to be shifted; it is a seed which must be sown, and pass through the several stages of growth. No doctrine of importance can be transferred in a matured shape into any man’s understanding from without: it must arise by an act of genesis within the understanding itself.”

--
* ‘Letters to a Young Man’. Letter V.
--

And so it may be said in regard to the responsiveness to the higher spiritual truths--I don’t say COMPREHENSION of the higher spiritual truths (that word pertains rather to an intellectual grasp), but RESPONSIVENESS to the higher spiritual truths. Spiritual truths must be spiritually responded to; they are not and cannot be intellectually comprehended. The condition of such responsiveness it may require a long while to fulfil. New attitudes of the soul, a meta/noia, may be demanded, before such responsiveness is possible. And what some people may regard in the higher poetry as obscure, by reason of the mode of its presentation on the part of the poet, may be only relatively so --that is, the obscurity may be wholly due to the wrong attitudes, or the no attitudes, of their own souls, and to the limitations of their spiritual experiences. In that case “the patient must minister to himself”.

While on the subject of “obscurity”, I must notice a difficulty which the reader at first experiences in his study of Browning’s poetry --a difficulty resulting from the poet’s favorite art-form, the dramatic or psychologic monologue.* The largest portion of his voluminous poetry is in this form. Some speaker is made to reveal his character, and, sometimes, by reflection, or directly, the character of some one else--to set forth some subtle and complex soul-mood, some supreme, all-determining movement or experience of a life; or, it may be, to RATIOCINATE subtly on some curious question of theology, morals, philosophy, or art. Now it is in strictly preserving the monologue character that obscurity often results. A monologue often begins with a startling abruptness, and the reader must read along some distance before he gathers what the beginning means. Take the monologue of Fra Lippo Lippi for example. The situation is necessarily left more or less unexplained. The poet says nothing ‘in propria persona’, and no reply is made to the speaker by the person or persons addressed. Sometimes a look, a gesture, or a remark, must be supposed on the part of the one addressed, which occasions a responsive remark. Sometimes the speaker IMPUTES a question; and the reader is sometimes obliged to stop and consider whether a question is imputed by the speaker to the one he is addressing, or is a direct question of his own. This is often the case throughout ‘The Ring and the Book’. But to the initiated, these features of the monologue present little or no difficulty, and they conduce to great compactness of composition-- a closeness of texture which the reader comes in time to enjoy, and to prefer to a more loosely woven diction.

-- * The dramatic monologue differs from a soliloquy in this: while there is but one speaker, the presence of a silent second person is supposed, to whom the arguments of the speaker are addressed. Perhaps such a situation may be termed a novelty of invention in our Poet. It is obvious that the dramatic monologue gains over the soliloquy in that it allows the artist greater room in which to work out his conception of character. We cannot gaze long at a solitary figure on a canvas, however powerfully treated, without feeling some need of relief. In the same way a soliloquy (comp. the great soliloquies of Shakespeare) cannot be protracted to any great length without wearying the listener. The thoughts of a man in self-communion are apt to run in a certain circle, and to assume a monotony. The introduction of a second person acting powerfully upon the speaker throughout, draws the latter forth into a more complete and varied expression of his mind. The silent person in the background, who may be all the time master of the situation, supplies a powerful stimulus to the imagination of the reader.--Rev. Prof. E. Johnson’s “Paper on ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’” (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Pt. III., p. 279). --

The monologue entitled ‘My Last Duchess. Ferrara’ is a good example of the constitution of this art-form. It is one of the most perfect in artistic treatment, and exhibits all the features I have just noticed. Originally, this monologue and that now entitled ‘Count Gismond. Aix in Provence’, had the common title, ‘Italy and France’, the former being No. I. Italy; the latter, No. II. France. The poet, no doubt, afterward thought that the Duke of the one monologue, and the Count of the other, could not justly be presented as representatives, respectively, of Italy and France. In giving the monologues new titles, ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Count Gismond’, he added to the one, ‘Ferrara’, and to the other, ‘Aix in Provence’, thus locally restricting the order of character which they severally represent.

In ‘My Last Duchess’, the speaker is a soulless VIRTUOSO-- a natural product of a proud, arrogant, and exclusive aristocracy, on the one hand, and on the other, of an old and effete city, like Ferrara, where art, rather than ministering to soul-life and true manliness of character, has become an end to itself-- is valued for its own sake.

The Duke is showing, with the weak pride of the mere virtuoso, a portrait of his last Duchess, to some one who has been sent to negotiate another marriage. We see that he is having an entertainment or reception of some kind in his palace, and that he has withdrawn from the company with the envoy to the picture-gallery on an upper floor. He has pulled aside the curtain from before the portrait, and in remarking on the expression which the artist, Fra Pandolf, has given to the face, he is made to reveal a fiendish jealousy on his part, occasioned by the sweetness and joyousness of his late Duchess, who, he thought, should show interest in nothing but his own fossilized self. “She had,” he says, “a heart-- how shall I say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the West, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace--all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least. She thanked men,--good! but thanked somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift.”

Her fresh interest in things, and the sweet smile she had for all, due to a generous soul-life, proved fatal to the lovely Duchess: “Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.”

He succeeded, and he seems to be proud of it, in shutting off all her life-currents, pure, and fresh, and sparkling, as they were, and we must suppose that she than sank slowly and uncomplainingly away. What a deep pathos there is in “then all smiles stopped together”! *

--
* “I gave commands” certainly must not be understood to mean
commands for her death, as it is understood by the writer of the
articles in ‘The Saint Paul’s Magazine’ for December, 1870, and
January, 1871. {See Preface: Note to the Third Edition.}
--

The contemptible meanness and selfishness of jealousy were never exhibited with greater power, than they are exhibited in this short monologue--a power largely due to the artistic treatment. The jealousy of Leontes, in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, of Shakespeare, is nobility itself, in comparison with the Duke’s. How distinctly, while indirectly, the sweet Duchess is, with a few masterly touches, placed before us! The poet shows his artistic skill especially in his indirect, reflected portraitures.

This short composition, comprising as it does but fifty-six lines, is, of itself, sufficient to prove the poet a consummate artist. Tennyson’s TECHNIQUE is quite perfect, almost “faultily faultless”, indeed; but in no one of his compositions has he shown an equal degree of art-power, in the highest sense of the word.

{‘My Last Duchess’}

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said,
‘Fra Pandolf’ by design: for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ‘twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say ‘Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much’, or ‘Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat’: such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,--good! but thanked
Somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, ‘Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark’--and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
--E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! *

--
* Claus of Innsbruck and also Fra Pandolf (v. 3) are imaginary
artists.
--

The last ten verses illustrate well the poet’s skilful management of his difficult art-form. After the envoy has had his look at the portrait, the Duke, thinking it time to return to his guests, says “Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet the company below, then.” His next speech, which indicates what he has been talking about, during the envoy’s study of the picture, must be understood as uttered while they are moving toward the stairway. The next, “Nay, we’ll go together down, sir”, shows that they have reached the head of the stairway, and that the envoy has politely motioned the Duke to lead the way down. This is implied in the “Nay”. The last speech indicates that on the stairway is a window which affords an outlook into the courtyard, where he calls the attention of the envoy to a Neptune, taming a sea-horse, cast in bronze for him by Claus of Innsbruck. The pride of the virtuoso is also implied in the word, “though”.

It should be noticed, also, that the Duke values his wife’s picture wholly as a picture, not as the “counterfeit presentment” and reminder of a sweet and lovely woman, who might have blessed his life, if he had been capable of being blessed. It is to him a picture by a great artist, and he values it only as such. He says, parenthetically, “since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I.” It’s too precious a work of art to be entrusted to anybody else.

IV. Browning’s Verse.

It seems to be admitted, even by many of the poet’s most devoted students, that his verse is, in its general character, harsh and rugged. To judge it fairly, one must free his mind of many merely conventional canons in regard to verse. Pure music is absolute. The music of verse moves, or should move, under the conditions of the thought which articulates it. It should serve as a chorus to the thought, expressing a mystic sympathy with it. Verse may be very musical, and yet more or less mechanical; that is, it may CLOTHE thought and sentiment, but not be a part of it, not EMBODY it. Unrippled verse, which many readers demand, MUST be more or less mechanical. Such verse flows according to its own sweet will, independently of the thought-articulation. But the thought-articulation may be so flimsy that it’s well enough for the verse so to flow.

The careful student of Browning’s language-shaping must discover-- the requisite susceptibility to vitality of form being supposed-- that his verse is remarkably organic: often, indeed, more organic, even when it appears to be clumsy, than the “faultily faultless” verse of Tennyson. The poet who has written ‘In a Gondola’, ‘By the Fireside’, ‘Meeting at Night’, ‘Parting at Morning’, ‘Gold Hair’, ‘May and Death’, ‘Love among the Ruins’, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’, the Incantation in ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ (some of which are both song and picture), and many, many more that might be named, certainly has the very highest faculty of word and verse music, of music, too, that is entirely new in English Poetry; and it can be shown that he always exercises that faculty WHENEVER THERE’S A REAL ARTISTIC OCCASION FOR IT, not otherwise. Verse-music is never with him a mere literary indulgence. The grotesquerie of rhythm and rhyme which some of his poems exhibit, is as organic as any other feature of his language-shaping, and shows the rarest command of language. He has been charged with having “failed to reach continuous levels of musical phrasing”. It’s a charge which every one who appreciates Browning’s verse in its higher forms (and its higher forms are not those which are addressed especially to the physical ear) will be very ready to admit. In the general tenor of his poetry, he is ABOVE the Singer,-- he is the Seer and Revealer, who sees great truths beyond the bounds of the territory of general knowledge, instead of working over truths within that territory; and no seer of modern times has had his eyes more clearly purged with euphrasy and rue. Poetry is with him, in the language of Mr. E. Paxton Hood (‘Eclectic and Congregational Rev.’, Dec., 1868), “no jingle of words, or pretty amusement for harpsichord or piano, but rather a divine trigonometry, a process of celestial triangulation, a taking observations of celestial places and spheres, an attempt to estimate our world, its place, its life amidst the boundless immeasurable sweeps of space and time; or if describing, then describing the animating stories of the giants, how they fought and fell, or conquered. . .a great all-inclusive strength of song, which is as a battle march to warriors, or as the refreshment of brooks and dates to the spent and toiling soldiers on their way, is more than the pretty idyll, whose sweet and plaintive story pleases the idle hour or idle ear.”

The Rev. Prof. E. Johnson, in the section entitled ‘Poets of the Ear and of the Eye’, of his valuable paper on ‘Conscience and Art in Browning’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part III., pp. 345-380), has ably shown that “the economy of music is a necessity of Browning’s Art”--that music, instead of ever being an end to itself, is with him a means to a much higher end. He says:--

“All poetry may be classified according to its form or its contents. Formal classification is easy, but of little use. When we have distinguished compositions as dramatic, lyrical, or characterized a poet in like manner, we have done little. What we want to ascertain is the peculiar quality of the imaginative stuff with which he plastically works, and to appreciate its worth. This is always a great task, but one particularly necessary in the case of Browning, because the stuff in which he has wrought is so novel in the poet’s hands. Psychology itself is comparatively a new and modern study, as a distinct science; but a psychological poet, who has made it his business to clothe psychic abstractions ‘in sights and sounds’, is entirely a novel appearance in literature.

“Now that phrase ‘clothing in sights and sounds’ may yield us the clue to the classification we are seeking. The function of artists, that is, musicians, poets in the narrower sense, and painters, is to clothe Truth in sights and sounds for the hearing and seeing of us all. Their call to do this lies in their finer and fuller aesthetic faculty. The sense of hearing and that of seeing stand in polar opposition, and thus a natural scale offers itself by which we may rank and arrange our artists. At the one end of the scale is the acoustic artist, i.e., the musician. At the other end of the scale is the optic artist, the painter and sculptor. Between these, and comprising both these activities in his own, is the poet, who is both acoustic and optic artist. He translates the sounds of the world, both external and internal,-- the tumult of storms, the murmurs of waves, the SUSURRUS of the woodland, the tinkling of brooks, the throbbing of human hearts, the cries of all living creatures; all those groans of pain, stammers of desire, shrieks of despair, yawns even of languor, which are ever breaking out of the heart of things; and beside all this, the hearsay, commonplace, proverbial lore of the world. He turns these into melodies which shall be caught up by those who listen. In short, he converts by his alchemy the common stuff of pain and of joy into music. But he is optic as well as acoustic; that is, he calls up at the same time by his art a procession of images which march or dance across the theatre of the listener’s fancy. Now the question of classification on this scheme comes to this, Does the particular poet who invites our attention deal more with the aesthesis of the ear or with that of the eye? Does he more fill our ear with sweet tunes or our fancy with shapes and colours? Does he compel us to listen and shut our eyes, or to open our eyes wide and dispense with all but the faintest musical accompaniment? What sense, in short, does he mainly address himself to? Goethe said that he was a ‘seeing’ man; W. von Humboldt, the great linguist, that he was a ‘listening’ man. The influence of Milton’s blindness on his poetry was noticed by Lessing. The short-sightedness of Wieland has also been detected in his poetry.

“If we apply these tests to Browning, there can be, I think, no doubt as to the answer. He is, in common with all poets, both musician and painter, but much more the latter than the former. He is never for a moment the slave of his ear, if I may so express it. We know that he has, on the contrary, the mastery of music. But music helps and supports his imagination, never controls it. Music is to Browning an inarticulate revelation of the truth of the supersensual world, the ‘earnest of a heaven’. He is no voluptuary in music. Music is simply the means by which the soul wings its way into the azure of spiritual theory and contemplation. Take only ‘Saul’ and ‘Abt Vogler’ in illustration. ‘Saul’ is a magnificent interpretation of the old theme, a favorite with the mystics, that evil spirits are driven out by music. But in this interpretation it is not the mere tones, the thrumming on the harp, it is the religious movement of the intelligence, it is the truth of Divine love throbbing in every chord, which constitutes the spell. And so in ‘Abt Vogler’; the abbot’s instrument is only the means whereby he strikes out the light of faith and hope within him. Not to dwell upon this point, I would only say that it seems clear that Browning has the finest acoustic gifts, and could, if he had chosen, have scattered musical bons-bons through every page. But he has printed no ‘versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae’ (Hor. ad Pis.). He has had higher objects in view, and has dispensed better stuff than that which lingers in the ear, and tends to suppress rather than support the higher activity of thought.

“When for a moment he shuts his eyes, and falls purely into the listening or ‘musing’ mood, he becomes the instrument of a rich deep music, breaking out of the heart of the unseen world, as in the Dirge of unfaithful Poets in ‘Paracelsus’, or the Gypsy’s Incantation in the ‘Flight of the Duchess’, or the Meditation at the crisis of Sordello’s temptation.

“When the keen inquisitive intelligence is in its full waking activity there grows ‘more of the words’ and thought, and ‘less of the music’, to invert a phrase of the poet’s. The melody ceases, the rhythm is broken, as in all intense, earnest conversation. At times only the tinkle of the pairing rhymes, of which Browning has made a most witty use, reminds that we are called to partake a mood in which commonplace associations are melting into the ideal. I believe the economy of music is a necessity of Browning’s art; and it would be only fair, if those who attack him on this ground would consider how far thought of such quality as his admits of being chanted, or otherwise musically accompanied. In plain words the problem is, how far the pleasures of sound and of sense can be united in poetry; and it will be found in every case that a poet sacrifices something either to the one or to the other. Browning has said something in his arch way on this point. In effect, he remarks, Italian prose can render a simple thought more sweetly to the ear than either Greek or English verse. It seems clear from many other of his critical remarks that he considers the demand for music in preference to thought in poetry, as the symptom of a false taste.

“Browning’s poetry is to be gazed at, rather than listened to and recited, for the most part. It is infinitely easier to listen for an hour to spiritual music than to fix one’s whole attention for a few minutes on a spiritual picture. In the latter act of mind we find a rich musical accompaniment distracting, while a slight musical accompaniment is probably helpful. And perhaps we may characterize Browning’s poetry as a series of spiritual pictures with a faint musical accompaniment.

“For illustration by extreme contrast, Milton may be compared with Browning. Milton was a great hearsay poet, Browning repeats no hearsay. In reading Milton, the difficulty is to keep up the mental tension where there is so little thought, strictly speaking. With Browning the highest tension is exacted.

“He is pre-eminently the looker, the seer, the ‘maker-see’; the reporter, the painter of the scenery and events of the soul. And if the sense of vision is our noblest, and we instinctively express the acts of intelligence in terms drawn from physical vision, the poet who leans most towards the ‘SEER of Power and Love in the absolute, Beauty and Goodness in the concrete’, takes the higher rank. This is no matter for bigotry of taste. Singers and seers, musicians and reporters, and reproducers of every degree, who have something to tell us or to show us of the ‘world as God has made it, where all is beauty’, we have need of all. But of singers there are many, of seers there are few, that is all.”

In the most difficult form of verse, namely, blank verse, Browning has shown himself a great master, and has written some of the very best in the literature. And great as is the extent of his blank verse, the ‘Ring and the Book’ alone containing 21,116 verses, it never entirely lapses into prose.

One grand merit of blank verse is in the SWEEP of it; another, in its pause-melody, which can be secured only by a skilful recurrence of an unbroken measure; without this, variety of pause ceases to be variety, and results in a metrical chaos; a third is in its lightsomeness of movement, its go, when well-freighted with thought. All these merits are found united in much of Browning’s blank verse, especially in that of ‘The Ring and the Book’. As an example of this, take the following passage from the monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi. It gives expression to his vision of Count Guido’s spiritual down-sliding; “in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour him, opens wide”:--

“And thus I see him slowly and surely edged
Off all the table-land whence life upsprings
Aspiring to be immortality,
As the snake, hatched on hill-top by mischance,
Despite his wriggling, slips, slides, slidders down
Hill-side, lies low and prostrate on the smooth
Level of the outer place, lapsed in the vale:
So I lose Guido in the loneliness,
Silence, and dusk, till at the doleful end,
At the horizontal line, creation’s verge,
From what just is to absolute nothingness--
Lo, what is this he meets, strains onward still?
What other man, deep further in the fate,
Who, turning at the prize of a foot-fall
To flatter him and promise fellowship,
Discovers in the act a frightful face--
Judas, made monstrous by much solitude!
The two are at one now! Let them love their love
That bites and claws like hate, or hate their hate
That mops and mows and makes as it were love!
There, let them each tear each in devil’s-fun,
Or fondle this the other while malice aches--
Both teach, both learn detestability!
Kiss him the kiss, Iscariot! Pay that back,
That smatch o’ the slaver blistering on your lip--
By the better trick, the insult he spared Christ--
Lure him the lure o’ the letters, Aretine!
Lick him o’er slimy-smooth with jelly-filth
O’ the verse-and-prose pollution in love’s guise!
The cockatrice is with the basilisk!
There let him grapple, denizens o’ the dark,
Foes or friends, but indissolubly bound,
In their one spot out of the ken of God
Or care of man for ever and ever more!”

Browning has distinctly indicated the standard by which he estimates art-work, in the closing paragraph of his Essay ‘On the Poet objective and subjective; on the latter’s aim; on Shelley as man and poet’.

“I would rather,” he says, “consider Shelley’s poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged AS UTTERLY PERFECT IN A LOWER MORAL POINT OF VIEW, UNDER THE MERE CONDITIONS OF ART. It would be easy to take my stand on successful instances of objectivity in Shelley: there is the unrivalled ‘Cenci’; there is the ‘Julian and Maddalo’ too; there is the magnificent ‘Ode to Naples’: why not regard, it may be said, the less organized matter as the radiant elemental foam and solution, out of which would have been evolved, eventually, creations as perfect even as those? But I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high, --and, seeing it, I hold by it. There is surely enough of the work ‘Shelley’ to be known enduringly among men, and, I believe, to be accepted of God, as human work may; and AROUND THE IMPERFECT PROPORTIONS OF SUCH, THE MOST ELABORATED PRODUCTIONS OF ORDINARY ART MUST ARRANGE THEMSELVES AS INFERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS.”

The italics are mine. I would say, but without admitting imperfect art on the part of Browning, for I regard him as one of the greatest of literary artists, that HE must be estimated by the standard presented in this passage, by the “presentment”, everywhere in his poetry, “of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal.”

The same standard is presented in ‘Andrea del Sarto’, in ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, and in other of his poems.

V. Arguments of the Poems.

* It has not been thought necessary, in these Arguments, to
use quotation marks wherever expressions from the poems are
incorporated; and especially where they are adapted in
construction to the place where they are introduced.

Wanting is--What?

“Love, the soul of soul, within the soul”, the Christ-spirit, the spirit of the “Comer” (o‘ e’rxo/menos, Matt. 11:3), completes incompletion, reanimates that which without it is dead, and admits to a fellowship with the soul of things; ‘Ubi caritas, ibi claritas’. See passage from ‘Fifine at the Fair’, quoted under ‘My Star’.

My Star.

The following passage from ‘Fifine at the Fair’, section 55, is an expansion of the idea involved in ‘My Star’, and is the best commentary which can be given on it:--

“I search but cannot see
What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own
For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known
The gain of every life. Death reads the title clear--
What each soul for itself conquered from out things here:
Since, IN THE SEEING SOUL, ALL WORTH LIES, I ASSERT,--
AND NOUGHT I’ THE WORLD, WHICH, SAVE FOR SOUL THAT SEES, INERT
WAS, IS, AND WOULD BE EVER,--STUFF FOR TRANSMUTING--NULL
AND VOID UNTIL MAN’S BREATH EVOKE THE BEAUTIFUL--
BUT, TOUCHED ARIGHT, PROMPT YIELDS EACH PARTICLE, ITS TONGUE
OF ELEMENTAL FLAME,--no matter whence flame sprung
From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness,
So long as soul has power to make them burn, express
What lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind,
Howe’er the chance: if soul be privileged to find
Food so soon that, at first snatch of eye, suck of breath,
It shall absorb pure life:” etc.

The Flight of the Duchess.

In ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ we are presented with a generous soul-life, as exhibited by the sweet, glad Duchess, linked with fossil conventionalism and mediaevalsim, and an inherited authority which brooks no submissiveness, as exhibited by the Duke, her husband, “out of whose veins ceremony and pride have driven the blood, leaving him but a fumigated and embalmed self”. The scene of the poem is a “rough north land”, subject to a Kaiser of Germany. The story is so plainly told that no prose summary of it could make it plainer. Its deeper meaning centres in the incantation of the old gypsy woman, in which is mystically shadowed forth the long and painful discipline through which the soul must pass before being fully admitted to the divine arcanum, “how love is the only good in the world”.

The poem is one which readily lends itself to an allegorical interpretation. For such an interpretation, the reader is referred to Mrs. Owen’s paper, read before the Browning Society of London, and contained in the Society’s Papers, Part IV., pp. 49* et seq. It is too long to be given here.

The Last Ride Together.

“The speaker is a man who has to give up the woman he loves; but his love is probably reciprocated, however inadequately, for his appeal for ‘a last ride together’ is granted. The poem reflects his changing moods and thoughts as ‘here we are riding, she and I’. ‘Fail I alone in words and deeds? Why, all men strive, and who succeeds?’ Careers, even careers called ‘successful’, pass in review--statesmen, poets, sculptors, musicians--each fails in his ideal, for ideals are not attainable in this life of incompletions. But faith gains something for a man. He has loved this woman. That is something gained. If this life gave all, what were there to look forward to? ‘Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride.’ Again,--and this is his closing reflection,--

“‘What if heaven be, that, fair and strong’”, etc.

--Browning Soc. Papers, V., 144*.

By the Fireside.

Perhaps in no other of Mr. Browning’s poems are the spiritual uses of “the love of wedded souls” more fully set forth than in the poem, ‘By the Fireside’.

The Monologue is addressed by a happy husband to his “perfect wife, my Leonor”. He looks forward to what he will do when the long, dark autumn evenings come--the evenings of declining age, when the pleasant hue of his soul shall have dimmed, and the music of all its spring and summer voices shall be dumb in life’s November. In his “waking dreams” he will “live o’er again” the happy life he has spent with his loved and loving companion. Passing out where the backward vista ends, he will survey, with her, the pleasant wood through which they have journeyed together. To the hazel-trees of England, where their childhood passed, succeeds a rarer sort, till, by green degrees, they at last slope to Italy, and youth,--Italy, the woman-country, loved by earth’s male-lands. She being the trusted guide, they stand at last in the heart of things, the heaped and dim woods all around them, the single and slim thread of water slipping from slab to slab, the ruined chapel perched half-way up in the Alpine gorge, reached by the one-arched bridge where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond, where all day long a bird sings, and a stray sheep drinks at times. Here, where at afternoon, or almost eve, the silence grows conscious to that degree, one half feels it must get rid of what it knows, they walked side by side, arm in arm, and cheek to cheek; cross silent the crumbling bridge, pity and praise the sweet chapel, read the dead builder’s date, ‘five, six, nine, recross the bridge, take the path again--but wait! Oh moment one and infinite! the west is tender, with its one star, the chrysolite! the sights and sounds, the lights and shades, make up a spell; a moment after, and unseen hands are hanging the night around them fast, but they know that a bar has been broken between life and life, that they are mixed at last in spite of the mortal screen.

“The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and for good,
Their work was done--we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood.”

Browning everywhere lays great stress on those moments of exalted feeling, when the soul has an unchecked play and is revealed to itself. See in the section of the Introduction on Personality and Art, the passage quoted from the Canon’s Monologue in ‘The Ring and the Book’, and the remarks on conversion.

Mr. Nettleship, in his ‘Essays on Browning’s Poetry’, has traced somewhat minutely the symbolical meaning which he sees in the scenery and circumstances of ‘By the Fireside’. Readers are referred to these Essays.

Prospice.

The speaker in this noble monologue is one who, having fought a good fight and finished his course, lived and wrought thoroughly in sense, and soul, and intellect, is now ready and eager to encounter the ‘Arch-Fear’, Death; and then he will clasp again his Beloved, the soul of his soul, who has gone before. He leaves the rest to God.

With this monologue should be read the mystical description, in ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King), of “the last, dim, weird battle of the west”, beginning,--

“A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea.”

Amphibian.

This poem is the Prologue to ‘Fifine at the Fair’.

Amphibian is one who unites both lives within himself, the material and the spiritual, in complete concord and mutual subservience-- one who “lives and likes life’s way”, and can also free himself of tether, leave the solid land, and, unable to fly, swim “in the sphere which overbrims with passion and thought”,-- the sphere of poetry. Such an one may be said to be Browning’s ideal man. “The value and significance of flesh” is everywhere recognized in his poetry. “All good things are ours,” Rabbi Ben Ezra is made to say, “nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.” The full physical life, in its relation to the spiritual, was never more beautifully sung than it is sung by David, in the poem of ‘Saul’. See the passage beginning, “Oh! our manhood’s prime vigor!” and the passage in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, descriptive of Hercules, as he returns, after his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis.

James Lee’s Wife.

The original title in ‘Dramatis Personae’ (first published in 1864) was ‘James Lee’.

The poem consists of a succession of soliloquies (rather than monologues*), separated, it must be supposed, by longer or shorter intervals of time, and expressive of subjective states induced in a wife whose husband’s love, if it ever were love, indeed, gradually declines to apathy and finally entire deadness. What manner of man James Lee was, is only faintly intimated. The interest centres in, is wholly confined to, the experiences of the wife’s heart, under the circumstances, whatever they were.

--
* For the distinction between the soliloquy and the
monologue, see the passage given in a note, from Rev. Prof.
Johnson’s paper on ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, under the
treatment of the monologue, p. 85 {part III of Intro.}.
--

The scene is a cottage on a “bitter coast of France”.

I. ‘James Lee’s Wife speaks at the Window’.--The first misgivings of her heart are expressed; and these misgivings are responded to by the outer world. Summer has stopped. Will the summer of her husband’s love stop too, and be succeeded by cheerless winter? The revolt of her heart against such a thought is expressed in the third stanza.

II. ‘By the Fireside’.--Here the faintly indefinite misgiving expressed in the first soliloquy has become a gloomy foreboding of ill; “the heart shrinks and closes, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.”

The fire on the hearth is built of shipwreck wood, which tells of a “dim dead woe befallen this bitter coast of France”, and omens to her foreboding heart the shipwreck of their home. The ruddy shaft of light from the casement must, she thinks, be seen by sailors who envy the warm safe house and happy freight. But there are ships in port which go to ruin,

“All through worms i’ the wood, which crept,
Gnawed our hearts out while we slept:
That is worse.”

Her mind reverts to the former occupants of their house, as if she felt an influence shed within it by some unhappy woman who, like herself, in Love’s voyage, saw planks start and open hell beneath.

III. ‘In the Doorway’.--As she looks out from the doorway, everything tells of the coming desolation of winter, and reflects the desolation which, she feels, is coming upon herself. The swallows are ready to depart, the water is in stripes, black, spotted white with the wailing wind. The furled leaf of the fig-tree, in front of their house, and the writhing vines, sympathize with her heart and her spirit:--

“My heart shrivels up and my spirit shrinks curled.”

But there is to them two, she thinks, no real outward want, that should mar their peace, small as is their house, and poor their field. Why should the change in nature bring change to the spirit which should put life in the darkness and cold?

“Oh, live and love worthily, bear and be bold!
Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange.”

IV. ‘Along the Beach’.--It does not appear that she anywhere in the poem addresses her husband, face to face. It is soliloquy throughout. In this section it does appear, more than in the others, that she is directly addressing him; but it’s better to understand it as a mental expostulation. He wanted her love, and got it, in its fulness; though an expectation of all harvest and no dearth was not involved in that fulness of love.

Though love greatens and even glorifies, she knew there was much in him waste, with many a weed, and plenty of passions run to seed, but a little good grain too. And such as he was she took him for hers; and he found her his, to watch the olive and wait the vine of his nature; and when rivers of oil and wine came not, the failure only proved that he was her whole world, all the same. But he has been averse to, and has resented, the tillage of his nature to which she has lovingly devoted herself, feeling it to be a bondage;

“And ‘tis all an old story, and my despair
Fit subject for some new song:”

such as the one with which she closes this soliloquy, representing a love which cares only for outside charms (which, later in the poem, we learn she has not) and looks not deeper.

V. ‘On the Cliff’.--Leaning on the barren turf, which is dead to the roots, and looking at a rock, flat as an anvil’s face, and left dry by the surf, with no trace of living thing about it (Death’s altar by the lone shore), she sees a cricket spring gay, with films of blue, upon the parched turf, and a beautiful butterfly settle and spread its two red fans, on the rock. And then there is to her, wholly taken up, as she is, with their beauty,

“No turf, no rock; in their ugly stead,
See, wonderful blue and red!”

and they symbolize to her, Love settling unawares upon men, the level and low, the burnt and bare, in themselves (as are the turf and the rock).

VI. ‘Reading a Book, under the Cliff’.--The first six stanzas of this section she reads from a book. *

--
* They were composed by Mr. Browning when in his 23d year,
and published in 1836, in ‘The Monthly Repository’, vol. x.,
pp. 270, 271, and entitled simply ‘Lines’. They were
revised and introduced into this section of ‘James Lee’,
which was published in ‘Dramatis Personae’ in 1864.
--

Her experiences have carried her beyond what these Lines convey, and she speaks of them somewhat sarcastically and ironically. This “young man”, she thinks, will be wiser in time,

“for kind
Calm years, exacting their accompt
Of pain, mature the mind:”

and then the wind, when it begins among the vines, so low, so low, will have for him another language; such as this:--

“Here is the change beginning, here the lines
Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
The limit time assigns.”

This is the language SHE has learned: We cannot draw one beauty into our hearts’ core, and keep it changeless. This is the old woe of the world; the tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die. RISE WITH IT, THEN! REJOICE THAT MAN IS HURLED FROM CHANGE TO CHANGE UNCEASINGLY, HIS SOUL’S WINGS NEVER FURLED! To this philosophy of life has she been brought. But she must still sadly reflect how bitter it is for man not to grave, on his soul, one fair, good, wise thing just as he grasped it! For himself death’s wave; while time washes (ah, the sting!) o’er all he’d sink to save.

This reflection must be understood, in her own case, as prompted by her unconquerable wifely love. It is this which points the sting.

VII. ‘Among the Rocks’.--The brown old earth, in autumn, when all the glories of summer are fading, or have faded, wears a good gigantic smile, looking not backward, but forward, with his feet in the ripples of the sea-wash, and listening to the sweet twitters of the ‘white-breasted sea-lark’. The entire stanza has a mystical meaning and must be interpreted in its connection.

She has reached, in this soliloquy, high ground:--

“If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
Make the low nature better by your throes!
GIVE EARTH YOURSELF, GO UP FOR GAIN ABOVE!”

The versification of the first stanza of this section is very lovely, and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits the completest inspiration. No mere metrical skill, nor metrical sensibility even, could have produced it.

VIII. ‘Beside the Drawing-Board’.--She is seated at her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coarse hand of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model, to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who

“Drew and learned and loved again,
While fast the happy moments flew,
Till beauty mounted into his brain
And on the finger which outvied
His art, he placed the ring that’s there,
Still by fancy’s eye descried,
In token of a marriage rare:
For him on earth his art’s despair,
For him in heaven his soul’s fit bride.”

Her effort has taught her a wholesome lesson: “the worth of flesh and blood at last!” There’s something more than beauty in a hand. Da Vinci would not have turned from the poor coarse hand of the little girl who has been standing by in wondering patience. He, great artist as he was, owed all he achieved to his firm grasp upon, and struggle with, and full faith in, the real. She imagines him saying:--

“Shall earth and the cramped moment-space
Yield the heavenly crowning grace?
Now the parts and then the whole! *
Who art thou with stinted soul
And stunted body, thus to cry
‘I love,--shall that be life’s strait dole?
I must live beloved or die!’
This peasant hand that spins the wool
And bakes the bread, why lives it on,
Poor and coarse with beauty gone,--
What use survives the beauty? Fool!”

--
* “On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect
round.”--Abt Vogler.
--

She has been brought to the last stage of initiation into the mystery of Life. But, as is shown in the next and final section of the poem, the wifely heart has preserved its vitality, has, indeed, grown in vitality, and cherishes a hope which shows its undying love, and is not without a touch of pathos.

IX. ‘On Deck’.--In Sections V.-VIII. the soliloquies are not directed to the husband, as they are in I.-IV. In this last, he is again mentally addressed. She is on board the vessel which is to convey, or is conveying, her to her English home, or somewhere else. As there is nothing in her for him to remember, nothing in her art efforts he cares to see, nothing she was that deserves a place in his mind, she leaves him, sets him free, as he has long shown to her he has wished to be. She, conceding his attitude toward her, asks him to concede, in turn, that such a thing as mutual love HAS been. There’s a slight retaliation here of the wounded spirit. But her heart, after all, MUST have its way; and it cherishes the hope that his soul, which is now cabined, cribbed, confined, may be set free, through some circumstance or other, and she may then become to him what he is to her. And then, what would it matter to her that she was ill-favored? All sense of this would be sunk in the strange joy that he possessed her as she him, in heart and brain. Hers has been a love that was life, and a life that was love. Could one touch of such love for her come in a word of look of his, why, he might turn into her ill-favoredness, she would know nothing of it, being dead to joy.

A Tale.

(The Epilogue to ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’.)

The speaker in this monologue is the wife of a poet, and she tells the story to her husband, of the little cricket that came to the aid of the musician who was contending for a prize, when one of the strings of his lyre snapped. So he made a statue for himself, and on the lyre he held perched his partner in the prize. If her poet-husband gain a prize in poetry, she asks, will some ticket when his statue’s built tell the gazer ‘twas a cricket helped his crippled lyre; that when one string which made “love” sound soft, was snapt in twain, she perched upon the place left vacant and duly uttered, “Love, Love, Love”, whene’er the bass asked the treble to atone for its somewhat sombre drone?

Confessions.

The speaker is a dying man, who replies very decidedly in the negative to the question of the attendant priest as to whether he views the world as a vale of tears. The memory of a past love, which is running through his mind, still keeps the world bright. Of the stolen interviews with the girl he loved he makes confession, using the physic bottles which stand on a table by the bedside to illustrate his story.

The monologue is a choice bit of grotesque humor touched with pathos.

Respectability.

By the title of the poem is meant respectability according to the standard of the beau monde.

The speaker is a woman, as is indicated in the third stanza. The monologue is addressed to her lover.

Stanza 1 shows that they have disregarded the conventionalities of the beau monde. Had they conformed to them, many precious months and years would have passed before they found out the world and what it fears. One cannot well judge of any state of things while in it. It must be looked at from the outside.

Stanza 2. The idea is repeated in a more special form in the first four verses of the stanza; and in the last four their own non-conventional and Bohemian life is indicated.

Stanza 3, vv. 1-4. The speaker knows that this beau monde does not proscribe love, provided it be in accordance with the proprieties which IT has determined upon and established. v. 5. “The world’s good word!” a contemptuous exclamation: what’s the world’s good word worth? “the Institute!” (the reference is, of course, to the French Institute), the Institute! with all its authoritative, dictatorial learnedness! v.6. Guizot and Montalembert were both members of the Institute, and being thus in the same boat, Guizot conventionally receives Montalembert. vv. 7 and 8. These two unconventional Bohemian lovers, strolling together at night, at their own sweet will, see down the court along which they are strolling, three lampions flare, which indicate some big place or other where the “respectables” do congregate; and the woman says to her companion, with a humorous sarcasm, “Put forward your best foot!” that is, we must be very correct passing along here in this brilliant light.

By the two lovers are evidently meant George Sand (the speaker) and Jules Sandeau, with whom she lived in Paris, after she left her husband, M. Dudevant. They took just such unconventional night-strolls together, in the streets of Paris.

Home-Thoughts from Abroad.

An Englishman, in some foreign land, longs for England, now that April’s there, with its peculiar English charms; and then will come May, with the white-throat and the swallows, and, most delightful of all, the thrush, with its rapturous song! And the buttercups, far brighter than the gaudy melon-flower he has before him!

Home-Thoughts from the Sea.

A paean, inspired by the sight, from the sea, of Cape Trafalgar and Gibraltar, both objects of patriotic pride to an Englishman; the one associated with the naval victory gained by the English fleet, under Nelson, over the combined French and Spanish fleets; the other, England’s greatest stronghold.

The first four verses make a characteristic Turner picture.

Old Pictures in Florence.